Now that 2014 is in the books, I thought I would take a look back at the past year of the blog. I think I have learned a few things over the last year which I hope will be helpful in the years ahead.

Before I get into the numbers and some of the lessons learned, I just want to say thank you to everyone who has stopped by and read the blog. I really appreciate it when people take the time to read something that I wrote, and even more when they leave a comment.

• Probably the biggest, and likely most obvious, thing I learned this year is that blogging is pretty much like any other task you can think of. The more you do it, the more you are able to do it and the easier it is. I liken it to exercising or eating a healthy diet. It can take a tremendous amount of effort to begin to do these things but once you get going and have established the routine of it, the amount of effort to maintain it drops considerably. If circumstances prevent you from doing these things for a period of time, you are right back where you started, more or less, and will need to spend the same amount of energy to get going again. I knew this was the case for exercise and diet but found this year it is the same for blogging. In July, August and September, the time I had devoted to blogging was given to my wife instead while she was here from Venezuela and it took me several months to get back on track.
• Right around the time I found I had less time to write, I was also running into an issue that I think is related to the simple fact that I was learning more, especially about philosophy, and rather than making it easier to write, it was actually making it harder. One of the keys in writing is that you must delimit your topic. You simply cannot write a blog post, or anything short of an encyclopedia, about EVERYTHING. I found that as I learned more, it became more and more difficult to delimit my topics. When I started out, it was fairly easy to keep things contained but as time went on I started seeing more and more connections, not all of which were completely clear in my thinking, and I would get lost in those connections and be unable to write at all coherently. I am starting to get a handle on this now and I hope it won’t be as much of a hinderance this year.
• A little technical issue I found about WordPress’ “publicize” feature in Jetpack. This feature allows you to auto-post to social media whenever you publish a new post to your blog. It is extra nice because you can customize which platforms your post to and modify the text of what gets posted. The problem came with the link that gets sent with it. It appears that the link goes just to the blog itself, not to the specific post. While in some ways this is not a problem, the people do get to the post, it does have a couple of problems. If you use custom headers, and I sometimes do, you don’t get them when you just link to the blog’s homepage. You see the default one instead. Also, it records the view as one of the home page rather than the specific post. I believe this is why my most viewed post in 2014 was my homepage, even though I don’t intentionally link to it. This makes it impossible to know which posts are actually the most viewed on the blog.

Some numbers

In 2014 I published 80 posts, though this would have been closer to 100, or more, if I had kept writing in August, September and October. My goal for 2015 is to write about 150 posts, or 3 per week more or less, which I think is doable if I stay in the routine of asking my mind to be on the lookout for items to write about and then writing about them.

The blog received 2432 views, or about 7 per day on average. One nice trend is that in November and December the number of views increased by 50% to 11 per day, a trend I hope continues. If I could average 11 views per day in 2015, that would give me about 4000 views.

My posts can be roughly divided into two categories: my commentary and articles and content posted from other sources, usually videos of Objectivist oriented speakers. Here are the top 5 posts viewed in 2014 from each of those categories.

Goals for 2015 (resolutions if you prefer)

Probably my biggest goal for the blog is to be more consistent. If I can avoid taking another 3 month hiatus from the blog, I should easily hit the 150 posts I mentioned above. At least one, and likely several, of these posts will deal with Vermont’s GMO labeling law.

I will also likely try to write more reviews of some of the books I read. I wrote a first one for Mujahid by Quent Cordair and found it a fun exercise that I think I would like to try more of. The short length of Mujahid made it a good one for a first attempt, as it was relatively easy to keep all the main points in mind while writing the review.

Perhaps my fundamental goal is to continue to learn about Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and how to apply it to living my life in the best way I can.

Again, thank you everyone for taking the time to read my blog over the past year or so, and I look forward to providing interesting reading over the year to come.

Regards