I published a little bit more this year, 75 posts vs. 68, and a couple of new pages. The average word count of each was higher. According to WordPress, about 70,000 people visited the blog, more than last year (which, to be fair, was a huge drop from previous years). I have no real idea how many people actually read each post but I suspect it’s a multiple of the WP figures: more than 2,000 people read by email, a few hundred via the WP feed, and another couple of thousand between three other platforms where the blog reposts automagically.

Most popular
  1. New car: an accessible minivan
  2. Fiction that passes the Fries Test*
  3. How ableism affects a book review
  4. So Lucky
  5. Books about women women don’t win big awards: some data*
  6. Hild*
  7. The Fries Test for disabled characters in fiction*
  8. Huge news: multiple sclerosis is a metabolic disorder*
  9. Booksellers, this one weird trick could increase your bottom line by 25%
  10. Lame is go gay*

I was surprised by the van post taking the top spot. But then I remembered Hacker News picked it up, and BoingBoing, and it made sense. For the first time, more than half of the top ten were perennials (*). With two exceptions, the most popular posts are connected, in one way or other, to disability. The exceptions are posts about literary prize data and Hild. 

Visitors
  1. US
  2. UK
  3. Canada
  4. Australia
  5. Germany
  6. France
  7. Sweden
  8. India
  9. Netherlands
  10. New Zealand

The top ten looks very much like last year, except the Netherlands and New Zealand replaced Ireland and Spain.

My visitors came from all over the world: 151 countries. When I looked at the nifty map WP analytics offers, I see that the gaps clump regionally. So for example most of the missing are countries are in Central and Western Africa, three from the Middle East (Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan), and a handful of remote (to me) islands or island nations: Svalbard and Greenland; Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands; and Cuba. The exception? Mongolia.

Referrals

How do the visitors get here? Like last year, organic search tops Twitter which tops Facebook. But this time, Hacker News and Wikipedia showed up in the top 5. And trailing way, way down the list now, my old Blogger site. I’m still going to leave it up, though, because a lot of stuff here still links to it.

2019

I’m glad that one of the popular spots went to Hild because I suspect you’ll be seeing more Hild-related posts next year. I may be talking less about disability because much of my time right now, and hopefully next year, is being spent in the seventh century. I’m having the best time building Anglo-Saxon settlements, infrastructure, and relationships in my head and on the page–which means at some point I’ll want to talk about it.

In terms of travel and major events I’m expecting a couple of things. So I might talk about those, too. As always, we’ll see. The only thing I know for sure is that plans always change…