To all my readers: Thank you, and Happy New Year for 2016. You made 2015 special for me. In this year, my readership more than doubled. I have had more visitors in 2015 than my previous two years combined. Each year, my stats have doubled over the previous year.
Clearly I must be saying something someone likes, because the numbers keep growing.
This year marks a decade blogging for me. I welcome all of you and hope my humble scribblings can continue to amuse, bemuse, inform and entertain you. I may be opinionated, but I try my best to be accurate, informed and honest with you.
Of course, I write mostly for myself, because writing is something I feel compelled to do, but also because I truly enjoy the experience of writing. And since my interests are rather eclectic, I tend to write about many things, many issues, events, ideas and philosophies, often as I encounter them.
In 2015, I wrote more than 200 posts which translates into more than 280,000 words. The two busiest months for me were August (36,701 words) and April (33,724). My total word count here tops 1.1 million since I began this blog in late December, 2011. And that doesn’t include what I wrote for the Municipal Machiavelli and ukulele music blogs, the CPLUG songbook, or for my freelance work!
The longest post this year (Whitewash) weighed in at a hefty 4,241 words, followed by Apps Are Making Us Criminals at 3,976. But posts from previous years generally were longer than those published in 2015 (my longest piece, on the bad science behind internet surveys, has more than 8,700 words…).
Thank you, too, to friends and family who proofread some of my material before I posted it. It’s always good to have another set of eyes on a work, as well as to confirm the accuracy (especially when it’s about local politics!).
Much of my traffic comes from search engines and Facebook. If you look way down at the bottom right of this page, you can see what the most popular posts were. My posts debunking pseudoscience and claptrap, or about mis-attributed quotations are very popular.
Thank you to everyone who shared a link to this blog, who posted it on social media and who sent it in email. I appreciate your connectivity.
I should say thank you, too, to our local bloggers who seemed determined to drive traffic my way despite our differences of political opinions. I am glad to have them as readers here, too. I wish I could say I reciprocate, but in truth, I cannot. I have tried, yes, but I’m afraid that my obsession for good writing, proper grammar, spelling and punctuation, and correct verb-subject agreement – not to mention good taste, logic and honesty – make it too painful to do so.
But I live in hope they visit my site so often in order to learn by my example. So to help them better themselves, I will continue to offer even more in 2016.
Who knows? They might pick something useful up by osmosis, and, through trial and error, in 2016 hammer out a post that doesn’t make literate people wince or cringe. I realize this is the pigs-might-fly theory but we can always hope. After all, they’ve been copying me for a couple of years already. Sooner or later, they’ve got to catch on to how English works.
Besides, isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery? 😉
Have a safe and contented 2016, dear readers, and thank you again for dropping by.
