In the past week I’ve been engaged in looking at my statistics… And since the blog moved from being self-hosted to wordpress.com during the year, I had to collate the statistics manually, a task during which I found myself evaluating the pros and cons of…
Self-hosted vs Hosted by WordPress.com
I enjoyed running my blog as a self-hosted venture, being able to customise to my heart’s content with all those neat little plugins – and no ads. Nevertheless, there came a point when I spent more time fixing software problems than I did blogging. Moving house was a major undertaking and it cost me some followers, all the likes and the search engine rankings to which I owed most of my traffic. (It was only in December, more than half-a-year after I completed the move that search engine traffic here started to match what it used to be at the old site.) On the plus side, I don’t miss having to tinker with the software on a daily basis, nor the painfully slow loading of the pages, nor the frequent and disheartening downtimes. Ultimately, giving up being self-hosted was the right move for me (and my everlasting gratitude to the support team at Jetpack who helped me with it – and without charging a penny).
And now the result of my statistics mongering: the most popular posts of last year.
If you missed any of them, here’s your chance to catch up! 🙂
Top Ten Reads
- Spain from the Bar: Interview with Joan Planas
- How to Fail as a Blogger (In 5 Easy Steps)
- Soft Lands Breed Soft Men: The Persian Choice
- Adventures in Spanish (Captain Alatriste)
- Five Books You Shouldn’t Read
- The Arsenal of Venice
- Riggers Aloft the Cutty Sark
- Tales of the Alhambra
- The Bible in Spain
- The Novel Life of Britain’s Greatest Frigate Captain
Top Ten Photo Posts
- Venice in Black & White
- Malta in Black & White
- London Street at Night
- Venice in Black & White II
- The British Museum Goes B&W (A Different Point of View)
- The Caldera of Santorini
- Greece in Black & White
- Ratlines (Up the Mast)
- Christmas Lights on the Cutty Sark
- Hills (And What People Built On Them)
Lessons for the Future?
It doesn’t take a genius to realise that most read and most liked are not necessarily the same (the lists above are a collation of the two). Nor does it take a genius to realise that most read is heavily dependent on publicity (shares on social media or high search rankings)… while most liked is dependent on most read.
So:
Advice to fellow hobby bloggers:
Have fun. Sod the statistics. 🙂
Request to my readers:
Would you people kindly SHARE my posts when you enjoyed them?! (Just saying.)
Waterblogged 