Okay, today is February 6, which means that my revolvermap that you can see over in the left margin has been up one entire year. Right now, it’s showing 148,950 visits since it’s inception. I suspect a couple of thousand of those are actually me, but I’m pretty happy that so many people stumble their way to my blog in that time. Over that same time period, Google Analytics reports 126,340 visits, 96,891 unique visitors, and 387,172 page views. The traffic to my blog has been pretty constant: around 300 views per day, with five or six blips caused by links from hackaday or Reddit. About one in four visitors are returning: the rest are new visitors. That seems pretty cool to me: reaching nearly 100K people with something I wrote seems oddly empowering.
But here’s the reality check. My most popular post: Viewing a V4L webcam with mplayer: a little throw away post I did back in 2007, giving the options that allowed me to show video from a V4L webcam using mplayer. It accounts for a little under 2.5% of all the hits to my blog. Two postings on the Fuji Real 3D W1 camera sum to actually a greater percentage (right around 3%). My Downside of Arduino is about 1.41% of all hits, mostly courtesy of a brief mention and flurry of activity from Reddit. My Hellduino project and my Arduino n’ Gameduino Satellite Tracker came in virtually tied at 1.16% and 1.15%, respectively.
What am I to make of all this? Well, I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon. 🙂
Addendum: Tomorrow will be February 7, 2012. This marks the completion of twenty years of work at Pixar Animation Studios. To all those who I’ve worked with over the span of the last two decades, thanks for helping provide one of the most stimulating work environments I could imagine, and for letting me play a small role in the history of animated films.
I visited Pixar back in the late 80s, not long after it started. We were working on a medical imaging project and were wondering if your technology would be applicable. We decided your focus was more on graphics than imaging so nothing came of it. But I have fond memories of the visit so early in the history of the company.