Putting a close on a great 2012, blogwise

As 2012 winds to a close, I’m looking back at another year on Gravitational Pull dot net, my eighth writing this blog. This year, I suspended my experimental commentary blog, The Orange View, in an effort to write fewer and better stories here. Some months worked out better than others — I had no posts in January, a bunch in February and March, none in April, few in June and July (took a long European vacation in there) and then decent productivity for the rest of the year. Traffic was up 54% from last year and more than double 2010, according to the unique visitor count on Google Analytics, though still far short of what I’d need to do this full time, sadly.

What were people reading about in 2012? Here are the 10 most popular posts I wrote in 2012:

1. One of these things is not like the other: Apple store, Microsoft store
2. John Gruber spills 2000 words on the importance of pixels and typography and the awesomeness of the new MacBook Pro with Retina display without ever mentioning that most apps look like ass and relegating to a footnote that the fifteen inch laptop size is a jack of all trades master of none that fits few people’s needs
3. Great Google Voice apps for Android and freedom from cell phone plan tyranny
4. A Mac user’s travels in Ultrabook land
5. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times: Tough to buy a new Mac
6. History will show journalists missed the big Amazon story today: ebook discounting is back
7. The great Google storage price hike of 2012
8. A longtime Mac user’s first impressions of the Thinkpad X1 Carbon
9. Finally, serious Lightroom photo syncing on the iPad – no iPhoto required
10. A Day in the Life: iPhone versus Nexus

I’ve excluded from the list my fixed pages as well as the ever-greens, like Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated), written more than two years ago but still drawing plenty of traffic (and grouchy comments). Lately, a bit of research I did about which parts of the 2010 Facebook movie, The Social Network, were accurate and which less so has drawn a lot of traffic, too. Overall, though, traffic from search engines suddenly dropped quite a bit just in the past month or so for unknown reasons — maybe Google tweaked their algorithms?

You can also see the rise and fall of various operating systems in the visitor data from WordPress. After many years as #1, Microsoft Windows saw a sharp decline in its share of visitors and was surpassed by those using the Mac. The Mac usage share actually also declined, but much less than Windows. And iOS? It’s share doubled and now equals almost half the share of either of the desktop OSs. Crazy. Android’s share almost doubled but from a much smaller 2011 base so it’s lagging well behind iOS.