Three Months of Blogging

I've now been blogging for exactly three months. During that time I've:

- Published 47 posts

- Had 117 comments

- Had 5,296 views - averaging just under 2000 a month.

- Gathered 19 regular followers.

Just under 80% of my views are from the UK, with the next most popular countries being the US (323), unspecified EU (226), Germany (90), Spain (77) and Australia (51). Viewing patterns vary: my most popular day had close to 200 views and I nearly always get over 50 on a day that has a new posts; days without a post can be as low as 2 and as high as 20 or 30, indicating that there are some people who check in every few days (as confirmed by the survey).

The most popular posts have been:

- Initial Hypothesis: The Game of Teaching Excellence (391)

- Votes at 16: A Call for Consistency (116)

- "Have Had Enough of Experts...": An Attempt to Find Common Ground (102)

- Four Political Tribes (96)

- Today's Events: Reflections from a Leave Voter (92)

From this we can tell that I like titling posts using a colon. There's also a lot of clustering between the top posts - mainly socioeconomic issues or politics - and then quite a gap between these and those that get less views (40-60), which are primarily those around books and games. This surprised me a bit - I thought book reviews would be more popular (based on the scientific reasoning that I like reading book reviews on other people's blogs) but potentially they're more niche.

In terms of other's contributions, I've had two guest posts, on from Chris North and Jacqueline Reiter. The most prolific commenters are Chris North (23) and Lafayette (22), with a large number of other people, including Julia, Josh, Tom Phipps and Stephen B, commenting on more than one occasion, to make up the 117 total. The most commented posts were Votes at 16 (21), followed by A More Transparent Tax System and Five Things We've Learned from Science (both at 10). This doesn't really capture the full extent of engagement as a lot of people who know me on Facebook there, but it still gives an indication.

Most importantly of all, I've had great fun. I've enjoyed the opportunity to share my views and write about things I feel passionate about or find interesting, and love the fact that people enjoy reading it - and that people from different parts of my life (or sometimes that I don't know at all) get drawn into interesting discussions with each other prompted by posts here.

Here's to many more quarters of blogging!