Another year is in the books, so here’s a quick look back at some highlights of the last 12 months of posts at the Gravitational Pull dot net blog. I was proud to see that total page views doubled in 2009 from the prior year to about 44,000 and total visitors also doubled to about 36,000. The growing audience came even as the total number of posts shrank by more than half to just 42.
My top 10 most-read posts during 2009 (not necessarily written in 2009) as measured by Google Analytics were:
1. How to fix stuck keyboard backlight on Macbook Pro
2. God is god: Ron Moore’s most excellent end for BSG
3. Stay away from Circuit City’s bogus “sale”
4. Apple’s Time Capsule Plays nice with Verizon’s FIOS
5. Verizon Mifi connects laptops, iPods, whatever to broadband
6. Page: Physics of Gravity
7. Reading Infinite Jest on Kindle
8. Amazon Kindle competitor eReader slashes ebook prices
9. Best way to sync Mac and Google contacts? There isn’t one
10. Mac users should stick with online backup Mozy
(The list excludes my front page, which got about 10% of total views for the year.)
No surprise that the simple how-to on unsticking the keyboard backlight written in September 2008 is my most popular feature. That’s the kind of thing that search engines spit out to endless queries from frustrated users all the time. The Time Capsule-FIOS post is also a vintage 2008 inclusion.
It’s a credit to my friend Shabbir Safdar that my ruminations on the last episode of Battlestar Galactica came in second. His post linking to mine sent over about 75% of the traffic, and continues to send a steady stream of 3 to 5 visitors a day. Amazing. Also, many thanks must go to a couple of aggregation blogs that sent a lot of traffic my way led by the irreplaceable Teleread.org and super- comprehensive MacSurfer.com. Thanks!
I’m glad to see such a mix of topics and post styles in the top 10. In addition to a couple of how-to’s and a couple of reviews, there are also a few of my newsier posts and some cranky ones, too.
There’s also a lesson about the power of domain names. The phrase contained in my domain name obviously is most directly associated with physics and gravity and all that. So I get a fair number of hits every year from key word searchers hoping to find out why the moon orbits the earth, how fast you’d get sucked into a black hole and so forth. I created a fixed page for those visitors and it’s on the top 10 list every year.
A different way to view the year is by my favorite posts of the year, regardless of traffic. Here’s my list:
1. God is god: Ron Moore’s most excellent end for BSG
2. Reading Infinite Jest on Kindle
3. Best way to sync Mac and Google contacts? There isn’t one
4. Apple gives stage to overpriced ebook developer Scrollmotion
5. Nook Delays: Why Barnes & Noble hates its customers
6. The messy, the missing and the mistakes: Adventures in iTunes Plus upgrading
7. Too many black boxes, too many power cords
8. Stay away from Circuit City’s bogus “sale”
9. Page: Messing with and canned
And since my traffic-based top 10 includes some 2008 posts, I’ll throw in one on my hand-selected list, from November 2008, that I’m still quite proud of:
10. Facebook isn’t a web site (or a spaceship), it’s a time machine
A couple of other fun stats for the year included that 51% of visitors were on machines running Windows, 44% Mac, 2% iPhone and 2% Linux. Browser usage was a little more varied, with 35% for Firefox, 35% for Safari, 23% for Internet Explorer and 4% for Chrome. Visitors mostly came from the United States followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany and India.
Hope your 2009 was fun and see you around in the year to come!
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