Last year on this blog
So this blog is now celebrating its 21st birthday (or 20 if you count from zero, or 18 if you want to be pedantic), and I figured I would do this yearly thing of reviewing how that went.
Number of posts
2022 was the official 20th anniversary in any case, and that was one of my best years on record, with 46 posts, surpassed only by the noisy 2005 (62) and matching 2006 (46). 2023, in comparison, was underwhelming: a feeble 11 posts! What happened!
Well, I was busy with other things, mostly away from keyboard, that I will not bore you with here...
The other thing that happened is that the one-liner I used to collect stats was broken (it counted folders and other unrelated files) and wildly overestimated 2022! Turns out I didn't write that much then:
anarc.at$ ls blog | grep '^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].*.md' | se
d s/-.*// | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -k2
57 2005
43 2006
20 2007
20 2008
7 2009
13 2010
16 2011
11 2012
13 2013
5 2014
13 2015
18 2016
29 2017
27 2018
17 2019
18 2020
14 2021
28 2022
10 2023
1 2024
But even that is inaccurate because, in ikiwiki, I can tag any page as being featured on the blog. So we actually need to process the HTML itself because we don't have much better on hand without going through ikiwiki's internals:
anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/ | grep 'href="\./' | grep -o 20[0-9][0-9] | sort | uniq -c
56 2005
42 2006
19 2007
18 2008
6 2009
12 2010
15 2011
10 2012
11 2013
3 2014
15 2015
32 2016
50 2017
37 2018
19 2019
19 2020
15 2021
28 2022
13 2023
Which puts the top 10 years at:
$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/ | grep 'href="\./' | grep -o 20[0-9][0-9] | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -10
56 2005
50 2017
42 2006
37 2018
32 2016
28 2022
19 2020
19 2019
19 2007
18 2008
Anyway. 2023 is certainly not a glorious year in that regard, in any case.
Visitors
In terms of visits, however, we had quite a few hits. According to Goatcounter, I had 122 300 visits in 2023! 2022, in comparison, had 89 363, so that's quite a rise.
What you read
I seem to have hit the Hacker News front page at least twice. I say "seem" because it's actually pretty hard to tell what the HN frontpage actually is on any given day. I had 22k visits on 2023-03-13, in any case, and you can't see me on the front that day. We do see a post of mine on 2023-09-02, all the way down there, which seem to have generated another 10k visits.
In any case, here were the most popular stories for you fine visitors:
Framework 12th gen laptop review: 24k visits, which is surprising for a 13k words article "without images", as some critics have complained. 15k referred by Hacker News. Good reference and time-consuming benchmarks, slowly bit-rotting.
That is, by far, my most popular article ever. A popular article in 2021 or 2022 was around 6k to 9k, so that's a big one. I suspect it will keep getting traffic for a long while.
Calibre replacement considerations: 15k visits, most of which without a referrer. Was actually an old article, but I suspect HN brought it back to light. I keep updating that wiki page regularly when I find new things, but I'm still using Calibre to import ebooks.
Hacking my Kobo Clara HD: is not new but always gathering more and more hits, it had 1800 hits in the first year, 4600 hits last year and now brought 6400 visitors to the blog! Not directly related, but this iFixit battery replacement guide I wrote also seem to be quite popular
Everything else was published before 2023. Replacing Smokeping with Prometheus is still around and Looking at Wayland terminal emulators makes an entry in the top five.
Where you've been
People send less and less private information when they browse the web. The number of visitors without referrers was 41% in 2021, it rose to 44% in 2023. Most of the remaining traffic comes from Google, but Hacker News is now a significant chunk, almost as big as Google.
In 2021, Google represented 23% of my traffic, in 2022, it was down to 15% so 18% is actually a rise from last year, even if it seems much smaller than what I usually think of.
Ratio | Referrer | Visits |
---|---|---|
18% | 22 098 | |
13% | Hacker News | 16 003 |
2% | duckduckgo.com | 2 640 |
1% | community.frame.work | 1 090 |
1% | missing.csail.mit.edu | 918 |
Note that Facebook and Twitter do not appear at all in my referrers.
Where you are
Unsurprisingly, most visits still come from the US:
Ratio | Country | Visits |
---|---|---|
26% | United States | 32 010 |
14% | France | 17 046 |
10% | Germany | 11 650 |
6% | Canada | 7 425 |
5% | United Kingdom | 6 473 |
3% | Netherlands | 3 436 |
Those ratios are nearly identical to last year, but quite different from 2021, where Germany and France were more or less reversed.
Back in 2021, I mentioned there was a long tail of countries with at least one visit, with 160 countries listed. I expanded that and there's now 182 countries in that list, almost all of the 193 member states in the UN.
What you were
Chrome's dominance continues to expand, even on readers of this blog, gaining two percentage points from Firefox compared to 2021.
Ratio | Browser | Visits |
---|---|---|
49% | Firefox | 60 126 |
36% | Chrome | 44 052 |
14% | Safari | 17 463 |
1% | Others | N/A |
It seems like, unfortunately, my Lynx and Haiku users have not visited in the past year. It seems like trying to read those metrics is like figuring out tea leaves...
In terms of operating systems:
Ratio | OS | Visits |
---|---|---|
28% | Linux | 34 010 |
23% | macOS | 28 728 |
21% | Windows | 26 303 |
17% | Android | 20 614 |
10% | iOS | 11 741 |
Again, Linux and Mac are over-represented, and Android and iOS are under-represented.
What is next
I hope to write more next year. I've been thinking about a few posts I could write for work, about how things work behind the scenes at Tor, that could be informative for many people. We run a rather old setup, but things hold up pretty well for what we throw at it, and it's worth sharing that with the world...
So anyway, thanks for coming, faithful reader, and see you in the coming 2024 year...
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