TL;DR
Today my blog hit a minor milestone: over 12,000 page views in the last 365 days. That's over two-thousand page views a month! While a long way short of other notable tech bloggers (yes, I'm looking at you Hanselman), I think it's a pretty decent number, particularly when considering the somewhat limited audience for my very targeted content. In this post I provide insights into my "Top 20" posts and my plans for the coming months.
Top 20
Posts By Weighted Page View
While looking over the blog statistics for the past year, I was very interested to understand which were my "top" posts. Initially I thought total page views for each post would be a good metric but, given older posts will naturally have more hits, I decided to weight total page views by publication date. This gave me the following:
In this chart the outer ring is the Top 20 blog posts based on weighted total page views and the inner ring is the same 20 blog posts based on actual total page views.
The Top 20 are as follows:
| Post | Weighted Views | Total Views |
|---|---|---|
| On the incredible value proposition of .NET & the Uno Platform | 152.19 | 739 |
| Less ReST, more Hot Chocolate | 112.25 | 1741 |
| Running UWP on Linux With Uno | 100.57 | 445 |
| Running UWP on a Raspberry Pi Using Uno Platform | 88.17 | 348 |
| State-of-the-art ML in UWP | 87.87 | 299 |
| Building .NET Core 3.0 With Azure Pipelines | 62.03 | 1138 |
| Cross-Platform Real-Time Communication with Uno & SignalR | 56.38 | 401 |
| The Seven GUIs of Christmas | 53.81 | 1028 |
| Augmenting the .NET Core 3.0 Generic Host | 47.2 | 806 |
| Many platforms, one world - Part 4 | 31.36 | 340 |
| Light-weight run-time composition for the .NET Core 3.0 Generic Host | 28.24 | 488 |
| Uno WebAssembly Containerization | 25.47 | 220 |
| Network Booting Many Raspberry Pis | 22.61 | 355 |
| Many platforms, one world - Part 1 | 19.54 | 230 |
| Many platforms, one world - Part 3 | 12.12 | 138 |
| Reactive State Machines | 11.83 | 442 |
| Giving Uno Some Swagger | 11.63 | 105 |
| Using a Hyperlink in MVVM | 11.44 | 440 |
| Many platforms, one world - Part 2 | 10.69 | 124 |
| A Kata for Katas | 10.47 | 98 |
This Top 20 by weighted total page views accounts for almost 90% of the page views this year and, interestingly, aligns pretty well with my (hypothetical) favourite blog post list.
Posts By Weighted Engagement
Next I was interested to see if there was a close correlation between page views and "engagement". In this instance I deemed engagement to be based on the average time spent reading a given page but, given readers will naturally take longer to read lengthier posts, I weighted time spent on the page by word count (excluding posts with less than 500 words). Here's what I ended up with:
Interestingly this bares little resemblance to the "Top 20 Posts By Weighted Page View" and contains many of my older posts. My guess here is that these are posts that people have come across these posts by actively searching for related keywords. As such, they're likely to have spent longer reading the page in more depth or interactively following steps therein as they're related to what they were searching for. In contrast to this, I imagine a large number of posts in the "Top 20 Posts By Weighted Page View" list are encountered via social media (Twitter) or news aggregator (The Morning Brew, Dotnet Kicks, Dew Drop, etc) and, as such, are read out of idle curiosity rather than specific interest which might explain the lower "engagement".
Tags By Total Time
Lastly I was interested to see just how much of the internet's time I've occupied with my myriad ramblings. The chart below shows the total time the internet has spent reading articles on my blog by tag (calculated as average time on page * total views):
Somewhat amazingly, over 6 person-days (!!!) has been spent reading articles on my blog about XAML and over 5 person-days reading articles about Uno Platform. That's pretty cool - although I very much hope this time has helped developers achieve goals rather than just killing time at work.
Anyway, here's the full Top 20 (apologies if some of the tag links don't work, I've been a bit inconsistent with casing):
| Tag | Total Views | Average Time On Page | Total Time On Page |
|---|---|---|---|
| xaml | 3018 | 00:03:04.4648148 | 6.00:27:37 |
| uwp | 3784 | 00:02:18.4156249 | 5.20:28:43 |
| uno platform | 4271 | 00:02:05.8527777 | 5.13:24:03 |
| .net core | 6184 | 00:01:36.6097803 | 4.10:16:13 |
| android | 2414 | 00:02:01.3119047 | 3.00:51:41 |
| raspberry pi | 1263 | 00:02:18.9000000 | 2.13:32:44 |
| mvvm | 440 | 00:07:32 | 2.07:14:40 |
| rx | 684 | 00:03:11.2500000 | 2.05:01:45 |
| ios | 1233 | 00:02:16.9366666 | 1.23:31:10 |
| reactive | 522 | 00:02:45 | 1.21:19:07 |
| patterns | 481 | 00:03:57.6666666 | 1.17:36:22 |
| state machines | 442 | 00:05:24 | 1.15:46:48 |
| linux | 793 | 00:02:57.9000000 | 1.12:00:19 |
| rest | 1852 | 00:01:28.7192982 | 1.10:04:10 |
| nswag | 1846 | 00:02:02.5789473 | 1.10:02:04 |
| surface | 832 | 00:02:12.0208333 | 1.06:04:33 |
| graphql | 1741 | 00:00:59.1578947 | 1.04:36:34 |
| dual | 492 | 00:02:43.2500000 | 1.02:27:20 |
| gui | 1181 | 00:01:22.2500000 | 1.01:20:31 |
| webassembly | 726 | 00:02:06.6166666 | 1.01:08:42 |
Still Being Brave
Just under a year ago I wrote "Be Brave. Like BAT, man!" about my transition to using the Brave browser and signing up to the Brave Rewards Creators Program. I'm pleased to say that I'm still using Brave as my default browser on Android (additional browser on PC) and have yet to find a website that didn't work correctly (or at least no worse than Chrome) despite having lots of ads/trackers blocked.
Furthermore the Brave Rewards Creators Program has proven to be relatively lucrative. Here's my current Uphold wallet:
While earnings of £50 (it was actually > £60 just a few days back) certainly aren't going to see me retire any time soon, it's still a decent amount for doing nothing. Indeed, I'd have written these blog posts anyway so any earnings from them are a bonus. Moreover, it's got me into the "crypto game" - effectively for free - and I'm very much enjoying speculating on relative rise and fall of BAT and BTC using just my Brave Rewards earnings.
Should you be a privacy conscious person - and you really ought to be - then I'd definitely recommend dumping Chrome ASAP and moving to a browser not created by a company that makes most of it's money from selling data about you. Firefox is a great choice for PC, especially with their Multi-Account Container extension. On mobile though I would definitely recommend Brave due to it's additional privacy features which save you time and money.
If you'd like to try Brave browser, then please use my referral link here as it'll net me a few additional BAT.
The Future
Writing this blog has been - and continues to be - a fantastic experience. Not only has it put me in contact with loads of brilliant people but it has also fundamentally improved my understanding of many of the technologies I've written about. Or, to quote one of my personal heroes:
If you want to master something, teach it. The more you teach, the better you learn. Teaching is a powerful tool to learning. - Richard Feynman #Math #STEM pic.twitter.com/xY3AdtW5EL
— Math Meaning 🧠🚀 (@MathMeaning) August 27, 2020
Moving forwards my hope is to publish at least a couple of new posts each month. I've got loads of interesting projects afoot which should afford me the opportunity to expand on some of the technologies I've already covered (i.e. Uno platform, ML, etc) and a whole new bunch of technologies I'm currently interested in (Azure AD B2C Authentication and RDF stores/ SparQL queries to name just a couple). I'm also considering migrating my blog from Wyam to Statiq (both written by the amazing Dave Glick) and will certainly write about the migration if/when it happens.
Finally...
... a huge thank-you to my readers! I sincerely hope you've all enjoyed reading my blog as much as I've enjoyed writing it. If there's something in particular you'd like me to write about (either expanding on a previous post or something new you feel I might be interested in) then just drop me a line using the links below or from my about page; I'm always happy to make new acquaintances and always interested in new collaborations.