In the Dark

I just received the following message from WordPress.com reminding me that today is the 17th anniversary of my registration with them, which is when I took my first step into the blogosphere. That was way back on 15th September 2008…

I actually wrote my first post on the day I registered but, unfortunately, I didn’t really know what I was doing on my first day at blogging – no change there, then – and I didn’t actually manage to figure out how to publish this earth-shattering piece. It was only after I’d written my second post that I realized that the first one wasn’t actually visible to the general public because I hadn’t pressed the right buttons, so the two appear in the wrong order in my archive. Such was the inauspicious beginning of this “shitty WordPress blog”!

Since then I have published 7,418 blog posts posts (including this one), which have altogether received over 5.8M page views from 2.4M unique visitors. That doesn’t include the 2000+ subscribers who receive posts by email nor those who view the federated version via the fediverse. The largest number of hits I have received in a single day is still 8,864 (in 2014, at the peak of the BICEP2 controversy).

This time next year this blog will be an adult! Having gone this far with it, I might as well continue until I retire…

P.S. I noticed recently that this blog is getting some traffic from China, where it was previously banned. along with all other WordPress.com sites. It’s interesting that this ban appears to have been lifted.

I just received the following message from WordPress.com reminding me that today is the 16th anniversary of my registration with them, which is when I took my first step into the blogosphere. That was way back on 15th September 2008…

I actually wrote my first post on the day I registered but, unfortunately, I didn’t really know what I was doing on my first day at blogging – no change there, then – and I didn’t actually manage to figure out how to publish this earth-shattering piece. It was only after I’d written my second post that I realized that the first one wasn’t actually visible to the general public because I hadn’t pressed the right buttons, so the two appear in the wrong order in my archive. Such was the inauspicious beginning of this “shitty WordPress blog”!

Since then I have published 6,974 blog posts posts which have altogether received over 5.5M page views. That doesn’t include the 2000+ subscribers who receive posts by email. The largest number of hits I have received in a single day is still 8,864 (in 2014, at the peak of the BICEP2 controversy). The most popular post in the last year was this one.

P.S. Blog traffic had been slow recently, but has increased dramatically in the past few days, perhaps because of the ban on access to it from Maynooth University campus…