I have a little project going, to reprint my most-viewed posts over the years. That is easier to manage than reprinting what I consider to be my best, because I am much too fond of my own writing and thinking and would have discomfort in the winnowing. There are oddities of what got the most hits, due mostly to titles with common search terms that would lead people to my site. Stonehenge, ABBA, and NH Accent have brought some accidental visitors, I suspect. I already have too many, and will have to set a higher cutoff.
I am about 80% done researching the list, and hit a surprising spike just now. In the fall of 2016 my number of pageviews tripled, post after post. It started slowly in the summer, peaked mid-November to mid-December, then gradually declined over the rest of the winter. I had no explanation at first, but I have a theory. This is the period leading up to the election, and especially its immediate aftermath. I doubt I was writing anything more compelling, but we were all more obsessively reading each other's stuff. Those who have to ability to check your own site's traffic, let me know if you had a similar spike.
It would be an anticlimax in a countdown, as it is fairly unrepresentative of my posting (though I did start out as more of a psychblogger), so I will let you know here that California Rocket Fuel, about a particular antidepressant combo is far and away my most-read post. Thousands more. It is a double, a very short 2008 post I linked to again in 2014 with a little further discussion. Both times I got very good comments, fun in themselves.
No spike. Quite flat over the fall, with a rise in January. OTOH, I decided back in 2008 that political blogging was bad for my soul, since I despise lies and it is terribly easy to extend that to despising liars.
ReplyDeleteMy most popular post was one in which I collected some animated mathematical gifs. One of the authors liked it and linked it to his (many) friends. (I haven't tried the fancy google tools yet.). Strangely enough, the posts I worked the hardest on are rarely high-view. That may say something about differences between what I find interesting and what others do--or perhaps that when I try to be too thorough or too concise my style deteriorates and the reader's eyes glaze over.