Happy New Year in Numbers, Charts, and Links
by Jon Peltier
Monday, January 5th, 2009
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Happy New Year
2008 was an eventful year, with some good stuff and some bad. The good events include starting the PTS Blog in February. The bad event I’ll share here is the blowout with my former web host, which led to some days without service (due to my violating their TOS in ways they couldn’t explain) and ultimately to switching hosts. I’ll probably switch again this year, but it will be planned and not rushed.
Thanks to all of you who follow this blog, and special thanks for all of the comments. That’s what makes a blog better than any old web site: it’s the comments and discussion that add perspective and keep me on track.
Among the interesting statistics about the blog: I wrote 232 Posts, which received 1650 Comments and 6567 Spam Comments (since the host switch in April). If not for Akismet, I’d have been inundated with spam. This blog has a lot to do with charting, so here are a few charts:
Not bad. The numbers have steadily increased since the switch in hosting companies, if we ignore the precipitous drop over the year end holidays. In fact, the drop is in line with what I’ve observed annually on my regular web site, and within a week the numbers will resume their upward trend. I don’t know whether visitors and page views in the charts above include readers who only saw the RSS feed (subscribers), but I don’t think so, since the subscriber count comes from FeedBurner and visitors and page views are reported by Google Analytics.
These numbers are for my blog only, not for my regular site. The regular site’s numbers are also increasing, in general a bit more than the blog stats alone would account for. The main site still gets 4 to 5 times the visitors and 6 times the page views that the blog gets, but the blog’s percentage is creep upwards.
The next two lists show the most viewed posts. Interesting that the FeedBurner list and the Google Analytics lists have only one post in common. Probably the FeedBurner list is of the most posts delivered via RSS, while the GA list shows posts visited later.
After that is a list of most commented posts, and finally a list of the web places besides RSS and Google that send readers my way.
Most read posts according to FeedBurner
- Clustered-Stacked Column Charts
- Secondary Axes in Chart
- Using Colors in Excel Charts
- Dynamic Chart using Pivot Table and VBA
- VBA Conditional Formatting of Charts by Series Name
- Dynamic Charts
- Changes to Charting in Excel 2007
- Secondary Axes that Work – Proportional Scales
- Clustered-Stacked-Column Combo Chart With Lines
- Export Chart as Image File
Most read posts according to Google Analytics
- Secondary Axes in Charts
- 9 Steps to Simpler Chart Formatting
- Clustered-Stacked Bar Charts
- Label Each Series in a Chart
- SOLVER – Optimization Approach to a Simple Physics Problem
- How to Build a Simple Panel Chart
- Excel 2007 Recalculates Slowly
- Goal Seek – Optimization Approach to a Simple Physics Problem
- Macs vs. PCs
- Explore Your Data With Pivot Tables
- Gapminder for Excel
- Clustered-Stacked Column Charts with Vertical Separators
Most commented posts
- Clustered-Stacked Column Charts
- Changes to Charting in Excel 2007
- A Belated Review of Excel 2007
- VBA Conditional Formatting of Charts by Series Name
- Dynamic Charts
- Export Chart as Image File
- Enhanced Export Chart Procedure
- Magazine Quality Chart (Economist)
- Bad Graphics – Stacked Pyramid Chart
- VBA to Split Data Range into Multiple Chart Series
- Line Chart vs. Step Chart
Sites referring the most visitors (besides the RSS feed and Google searches)
- Pointy Haired Dilbert Creative blog by new MVP Chandoo
- Daily Dose of Excel – Dick Kusleika’s Excel Opus
- Contextures – Debra Dalgleish’s Excel blog
- Lockergnome – a forum I’m unfamiliar with, but I guess I should visit
- Mr Excel – Outstanding forum for Excel help
- FlowingData – Nathan’s Visualization blog
- Charts – A simply named blog by Jorge Camoes
Related Posts:
- Macs vs. PCs
- Blog Musings
- Looking Back at Peltier Tech in 2009
- Spike in Blog Traffic
- Web Stats – June 2009
- Weekend Fun: New iGoogle Interface Unpopular
- Clustered-Stacked Column Chart Utility
- New Feature: The Chart Doctor
- Comparison of Search Share, September and October 2009
- Chart Selection Guide
Posted: Monday, January 5th, 2009 under General.
Comments: 7
Comments
Comment from Bernard Lebelle
Time: Monday, January 5, 2009, 7:59 am
Jon,
All the best for 2009. Creating a blog beside your website was a great initiative.
Best regards
Comment from Liu ’s chart blog
Time: Monday, January 5, 2009, 8:03 am
Hi jon:
Congratulations! you are a productive blogger , we all learn so much here ,thanks for your share !
recently , I also write a post to summrize my blog ( from 2008.3 ), welcome to my blog and left your comment.
Comment from Liu ’s chart blog
Time: Monday, January 5, 2009, 8:03 am
and ,Happy new to you!
Comment from derek
Time: Monday, January 5, 2009, 1:42 pm
Interesting that the FeedBurner list and the Google Analytics lists have only one post in common.
I understand why the most-read might not overlap with the most-commented, but the Feedburner list overlaps reasonably well with the comments. I’m surprised that the Google Analytics list overlaps so little with commented posts. Again, I suppose that’s a function of it being a count of posts read weeks and months after they were written: few people will comment on an old post, but many will comment on a fresh one. But people are as happy to read an old post as a fresh one.
Comment from Gabriela Cerra
Time: Monday, January 5, 2009, 2:40 pm
Jon
Congratulations. Good numbers. It is not a surprise with such a good quality blog. When I see a site like yours, I don’t understand how a person can find the time to do something like this, just to help others and make theirs life easier.
What advice would you give to a new blogger?
Do you have any specific goal for 2009 for your site or blog?
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Monday, January 5, 2009, 4:34 pm
Derek -
I was thinking that it had to do with statistics over a long time period after a post is published, compared to short term stats for fresh pages, especially since I noted that the GA numbers were substantially higher than the FeedBurner stats. If you thought of it too, it must be a reasonable explanation.
Gabriela -
Thanks for the note. Regarding advice for a blogger, I’d say write about something you’re interested in, or you’ll never stick with it. Write regularly and write often, at least a couple times a week. Don’t worry if your writing isn’t perfect, it will improve.
Goals for 2009? Migrate to a new template, for one. This was a 2008 goal, I even purchased a decent template (Thesis), but never had time to make the transition. I even was going to work on it over the holidays, but then a client needed a lot of hands on attention. There are also some streamlining details, as well as keeping to a 3-5 post per week schedule. There’s no real shortage of ideas, just of time, especially with keeping the business running.
Comment from Darlene
Time: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 12:50 pm
Jon, May 2008 be Happy and Healthy for you. Thanks for your insight.
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