Friday, January 31, 2020

Looking Back for All-time Blogging

I started blogging in fall 2009. The table shows how number of articles and word count vary from then till the end of 2019. The scattergraph shows data points representing all the word counts of each article from first to last. A thick swath between 400 and 600 words indicates my favored word-count range. The word-count graph with year labels is another way to view word-count densities.

 
Closer Look at Word Counts

The high-word count graph shows more year-to-year variation than low-word counts. (The average and median don't look veer from each other by much.)

The all-time article word count stats:

High: 1701, Dec 30, 2019 ("Assessing My Christmas 2019 Lemon Meringue Pie")
Low: 114, Oct 12, 2019 ("Halloween Scenes Around")
Average 638 (all word counts added and divided by 258)
Median 587.0 (midpoint between high and low word count)

Coincidentally, 2019's stats match high and low word counts. However, 2019's average (568.0) and median (540.5) run lower. Explanation? High amount of videos and pictures in the articles that year. Also, becoming more involved with videos that are not associated with articles. More details farther down.

Another word-count related graph shows 1000+ word-counts more in the last half of my blogging history.



Topic

A somewhat challenging task I slogged through in preparing for this article was assigning a topic type. I've had stages of writing about recipes, info, music, some how-tos. When I started assigning labels, I had a conflict on whether a food recipe was food or how-to. After I tallied items, I found "food" to be a huge bucket, so I separated them between food and food recipe. As for "misc", I didn't see how to call them anything else.


A couple of standout categories by year are "plantlife" for 2013 and "buglife" for 2017.

Of the 24 articles in 2013, my "plantlife" topic was composed of my 16-week series about a triplet of century plants. I took pix when I first spotted them, and returned weekly for subsequent pix until the last one's demise. (Start with "Century Plant Triplets--Stalk Starts".

Of the 24 articles in 2017, most "buglife" articles were about insects, spiders, and cicadas. I titled 16 of them with a "Leggy Bugs". Open the links at the Blog Archive index (lower right side of blog window) for 2017 to view various buglife titles.

Graphics Type

Images show changing trends over time for topics, graphic type accompaniments. Word counts and number of blogs by the year might not be easy to infer. From 2014 on, I decided to publish twice a month, a pace of 24 annually. That quota contrasts with my annual output in 2010 (36), 2011 (12), and 2013 (32).


Initially had no or few images. Without giving much thought, I started providing images (some drawings, some stills), later providing videos. Several of my blogs include both images and video links.

My video toe-dipping year started in 2013 (1). I skipped doing any in 2014, and put out a paltry 3 in 2015. My 2016 and 2017 articles each included 9 video accompaniments. Although my articles for 2018 included only five video accompaniments, pix abounded aplenty.

Most Popular Article and Accompanying Video

My most popular article is "Stuck Blender Blade?", from October 2015, which might have cleared 4600 views by the end of 2019. Funny thing is that I created and uploaded the video, about three weeks later. By 2019 end, it was just 13 views shy of 24000. (It apparently cleared it late Jan 1 or sometime Jan 2.)

The Blogger stats for articles that match YT titles don't synchronize well for popularity—pretty much only the blender blade topic. Blogger views and YouTube view counts can vary wildly from each other.

More into YouTube

Last June, I started creating and uploading videos that didn't originally accompany articles. I called them "Eye-caught Snippets", totaling 13 by near the end of December. I did incorporate some of the snippets into article-associated videos. I'd consider most of the snippet videos topic buckets to be "deer", "buglife", or "plantlife".

Links to each article are at the Blog Archive index (lower right side of blog window.)

Thursday, January 30, 2020

Looking Back for 2019 Blogging

As part of looking back on 2019, I also cast a backward look toward my entire blogging experience. More on the farther-back look (10+ years, from September 2009 to 2019) in Looking Back for All-time Blogging". The table shows stats for 2019 for each of the 24 articles (twice a month)—word count, topic, and graphics type. Links to each article are at the Blog Archive index (lower right side of blog window.)

Word Count

The Word Count column shows number of words for each of the articles in 2019.

High: 1701, Dec 30, 2019 ("Assessing My Christmas 2019 Lemon Meringue Pie")
Low: 114, Oct 12, 2019 ("Halloween Scenes Around")
Average 568.0 (all word counts added and divided by 24)
Median 540.5 (midpoint between high and low word count)

Topic

My most-viewed  topic was a toss-up between deer (5) and plantlife (5), followed closely by buglife (4). This was an extraordinary year for deer; I did not write at all about any in previous years. Maybe 2018's rains brought on all sorts of eatin's that attracted loads of deer and spawned fawns. The topic tally is as follows, from most to least:

deer, 5
plantlife, 5
buglife, 4
how-to, 3
food, 2
parody, 2
avian, 1
music, 1
seasonal, 1

Graphics Type

Videos and pix accompanied more than half the articles. Shot lots of deer, plantlife, and buglife. Plants were various, indicating 2018's rains were good to them. Buglife included mostly cicadas, amazingly, a prolific year for them.

Last June, I started creating and uploading videos that didn't originally accompany articles. I called them "Eye-caught Snippets", totaling 13 by near the end of December. I did incorporate some of the snippets into article-associated videos.