It looks like I am developing a tradition of looking back at the past year on the blog and taking note of the successes and the lessons learned. As with last year, before I get to looking at specifics I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to stop by the blog and especially those who have taken the time to leave comments. It is greatly appreciated.

It has been somewhat of a mixed bag here at the blog this year. I did not meet several of my goals from last year, more on that below, but I did learn a lot about the more technical things. I learned more about using social media to promote the blog, using tools for WordPress that allow me to capture comments from some of the social media posts (I think this is what helped with my comment count this year) and I delved into getting the blog to run faster. (A site called GTMetrix was helpful in this regard.) This last item I did just in time as shortly after I set up WP Cache on the site and ran things through Cloudflare, I had a big (for me) spike in traffic to the blog thanks to a mention of one post by Yaron Brook on Facebook. (This post of his led to the blog post referenced being the top viewed new post of the year and second overall.)

In last year’s review, I set three goals for the blog, two of which I had direct control over while the third I did not. Sadly, the two I had direct control over I failed to achieve. I had a goal of writing about 3 posts per week for a total of about 150 posts over the course of the year. While I started out on schedule, writing quite frequently, as with last year I had a fairly lengthy period when I hardly wrote at all. (This was largely the period when my wife was here from Venezuela. I need to find the proper way to balance my writing and spending time with her.) Even once I had time to write again, it was difficult to get into the swing of things and I still am not back to where I was at the start of last year. The result was that I published just 83 posts this year.

Posting pattern for 2015

The second goal I had set was to write more book reviews. Last year I wrote one for Quent Cordair’s Mujahid, a wonderful short screenplay, and I enjoyed doing that and so I set a goal to do more of them. Alas, I didn’t write any more reviews this year.

The goal I had for the blog that wasn’t in my direct control was in the number of page views the blog would receive. Last year the blog received a total of 2432 views for an average of 7 per day. I hoped to see a 50% increase in 2015, or 11 views per day and about 4000 views total. I far exceeded this goal. The blog had just over 5000 views this year, averaging 14 per day, from people in 67 countries. So instead of a 50% increase, I saw a 100% increase. I also saw nearly double the number of comments to the blog.

Last year I listed the most viewed posts on the blog in two categories, my own commentaries and articles and external content, mostly videos of talks and lectures. I’ve modified that a bit this year to break things down into three categories. I am keeping the two from last year, but restricting it to posts published in 2015 while the third category is for most viewed overall, regardless of the source or when it was published. I used a plug in  to randomly retweet older posts which often take on new life. In this case, the top viewed post overall is a short video from Yaron Brook that I published on the blog in 2013. That year it received 95 views while this year it received 633.

Goals for 2016 (resolutions if you prefer)

• As I noted last year, writing is like pretty much any other activity in that the more you do it, the more you are able to do and the easier it is to do. Conversely, when you stop doing it, the more effort it takes to do and keep doing it. So this year, my goal in writing is more modest than last year. I want to get onto a schedule of writing about 2 posts on average each week. This will give me around 100 posts for the year. I think this is more reasonable since I have a lot going on including a full time job that isn’t writing on my blog.
• Last year I did not achieve my goal of writing more book reviews, but it is something that interests me, so I will attempt to do a couple this year. I have been toying with doing a single review of a series of books by Horatio Alger. Hopefully that will be accomplished this year.
• Post more positive items. So far, the majority of the original content I write tends to be about negative things, especially in politics. Given the state of politics in the United States and my view that the government no longer acts to protect rights, this isn’t terribly surprising. Despite all this, there are still some great things happening in this country and the world, I want to spend some time writing about that.
• It would be great if I could double the views of the blog in 2016, but that might be a stretch. It isn’t something I can directly control, but I’d be pleased to have 20 views per day (about a 33% increase) or 7300 total views for the year.