State of the Blog 2010
It is hard to believe that I have been blogging for nearly three years. Every year around the end of January I have posted some information gleaned from Google Analytics that I find interesting, along with the numbers from the previous years. Here are the posts from my first and second years if you are interested in looking at them.
Posts: 103 (2nd year: 84, 1st year: 80)
Posts about beer 95 (2nd 53, 1st 53)
Clearly I have been a bit lazy on the non-beer fermentation front, but hopefully I will remedy this deficiency in 2010.
It is always nice to see those numbers continuing to climb, thanks to all of you who have posted links and told your friends about the blog. This January I already have nearly 10,000 hits, so hopefully site traffic keeps trending up. The spike in April was from my Beer Wars Rant which received lots of links and buzz on the internets.
Page Views: 141,229 (2nd: 71,63, 1st: 22,435)
Unique Visitors: 34,538 (2nd: 21,219, 1st: 6,110)
Search Engines: 38,020 (2nd: 16,030, 1st: 3,373)
Referring Sites: 24,605 (2nd: 14,779, 1st: 5,431)
Top Referring Sites:
1st Beer Advocate (2nd) (2nd)
2nd Homebrew Talk (4th) (7th)
3rd Rate Beer (7th) (5th)
As you might be able to tell from the numbers I migrated over to posting on Homebrew Talk instead of Northern Brewer (which was the top referring site the first two years). The switch was not an intentional decision on my part, just something that happened over time.
People from 129 (2nd: 109, 1st: 68) countries visited.
1st USA (1st, 1st)
2nd Canada (2nd, 2nd)
3rd UK (3rd, 4th)
4th Australia (4th, 3rd)
5th Sweden (6th, 6th)
6th Denmark (5th, 7th)
7th Norway (9th, 8th)
8th New Zealand (7th, 5th)
9th Italy (8th, 17th)
10th Germany (10th, 13th)
Looks pretty stable this year, although clearly my popularity continues to rise in Scandinavia, while New Zealand isn't keeping up with the others.
About 83% (2nd, 82%, 1st: 85%) of the visitors to the blog were from America.
1st California (1st, 1st)
2nd Pennsylvania (2nd, 3rd)
3rd Illinois (4th, 7th)
4th New York (3rd, 6th)
5th Massachusetts (7th, 10th)
6th Washington (10th, 12th)
7th Virginia (6th, 4th)
8th Texas (6th, 13th)
9th Colorado (11th, 11th)
10th DC (9th, 2nd)
The list looks pretty stable, but Illinois and Washington are the two biggest climbers this year.
In case you were wondering the state I got the fewest hits from was North Dakota with 24, taking over the a spot held by Wyoming the last two years.
In the browser wars Internet Explorer lost even more ground this year to 28% (2nd: 36%,1st: 40%), and Firefox edged up slightly to 50% after 2 years at 49%.
Operating System:
72% Windows (2nd: 76%, 1st: 79%)
23% Mac (2nd: 19%, 1st: 17%)
4% Linux (2nd: 4%, 1st: 5%)
.2% iPhone (2nd: .5%, 1st: .05%)
Not sure what it says about my site, but that is certainly a lot more Apple users than a random sampling of the population would produce.
Besides the main page, the most viewed articles have gone to the my no-knead sourdough recipe, water treatment guide, and my Berliner weisse recipe.
The number of subscribers to my feed has really exploded over the last year, growing from 250 to over 1,600 today. A site called FriendFeed seems to be responsible for a good chunk of that growth (hello to anyone on there). The total number of feed views was 148,508 which is just above the views for the actually website. I didn't start using FeedBurner to track feed usage until the middle of 2008, so I don't have the hard numbers for the first two years (but I am sure I have gotten more growth on it than anywhere else).
Things on tap for year four of the Mad Fermentationist:
Sour beer solera barrel project.
Brewing my first batch of sake in the next couple months.
More homemade cheese and cured meat
More sourdough recipes (now that the weather is cooler I have been baking a lot, just not posting)
Bottling the group sour wee heavy (and racking a big porter into the barrel funkify)
Plenty of updates on all of the sours aging in my basement and all of the clean beers I have in the works.
The return of the Fermentationette's Farmers Market Lunch posts
As always, if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, complaints etc... please email me at madfermentationist@gmail.com
Posts
9 comments:
Happy 3rd birthday! You must have started almost exactly a year before I did. I was just about to celebrate my blog's 2nd anniversary.
The first three things on your list of things to do this year have me very excited.
Happy anniversary - great blog! Gives me confidence to try crazy sour beer ideas in the land of the IPA.
I skip right over the cheese and meat posts though ;). How about pickles and other wild fermentation foodstuffs instead?
Cheers,
Sam
I did a couple pickle/sauerkraut recipes back in the day. My results were more variable than I liked though, I tossed a couple batches of pickles that got really soft and unpleasant.
Good luck with the sake. It's an interesting process. I've made it four times and the last time the fungus stage got a little hot, resulting in poor "conversion" - lots of leftover solids. Tasted OK but was definitely on the weak side.
Keep up the great work. I have been enjoying this site for more than 1.5 years.
Congrats on three years well done. Looking forward to that sake batch.
Mike,
I live in San Jose, Costa Rica and found your blog from a link on the Thirsty Pilgrim. I discovered Joe's blog after a few Google searches for home brewing information for Costa Rica.
I have left your website up on my computer's browser for about 3 days, slowing making my way through different posts. After reading your website stats recap, I realized my time here was going to throw some interesting data into your next Analytics review.
I have a basic home brew kit on the way, starting from extract. If I make it to the stage where I have something to contribute, I'll comment on a beer related post, but at his point I just wanted to say I enjoy reading about your experiments and experiences. Your passion is obvious. Thanks for sharing in such a detailed and generous manner.
Thanks Chris! Sorry not to respond sooner, blogger thought you were a spammer for some reason (first time it caught anyone accidentally). Hopefully by now you are well into your first batch.
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