Stats 3

This website is three years old today.

It’s this website’s third birthday. The last two birthdays, I took this opportunity to share some interesting statistics about the site – well, I hope they’re interesting to someone, anyway.

Readership has increased every year; the site has seen more visitors in the first two months of this year than they did in the entire first year of the site. And that figure doesn’t account for email subscribers or people reading via the RSS feed.

About a third of the website’s traffic comes from search engines (primarily Google), although that ebbs and flows according to changes in the search algorithms. Some people have found the website via links on Metafilter, Reddit, Cracked, Fark, or Hacker News, but this usually means a spike for a day or two and then back to normal.

As of today, the total word count of this site is a little over 354,000; longer than Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and knocking on the door of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

The single most popular post remains the election of the doge, followed by Porky Pig swearing for some reason. It warms my generalist heart to see two such antithetical posts at the top of the list.

My category expansion last year increased the number of categories to 44 (not counting meta-categories and special categories). Last birthday I mentioned that I’d like to have at least one post in each intersection of two categories, and that category expansion has made this goal even more challenging. Right now, ten percent of the possible two-category combos have no posts; another ten percent have just a single post in common.

(For example, the only intersection between animals and architecture is the pig toilet; the only intersection between games & sport and food & agriculture is the classic Christmas game flapdragon.)

As I mentioned a little while ago, as of today I am dropping the frequency of posts on this site. It has been really fun to post one interesting thing every single day, but I have some other projects that are going to take up some time. So, new posts will continue, but maybe just two or three a week. And if you have any good ideas that you’d like to see on the site, please drop me a line!