Happy 2021, everyone! 2020 has been something, hasn’t it?
On xykademiqz, I’ve had periods of intense blogging and periods of, ahem, no blogging at all. But I’m not going anywhere and plan to blog, as I have in the past, when I have something to say. December has been a bit dry, but I hope to be back with 1-2 posts per week in the new year.
Here’s 2020 in a nutshell, based on WordPress stats.
Total views: 100,987
Visitors: 23,044
Comments: 608
Below is a list of the most read posts (screen shot). The ones with a vertical blue bar on the left were written in 2020.
Here are the links to those best beloved born-and-read-in-2020 posts:
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/06/29/reader-question-to-pseud-or-not-to-pseud/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/07/05/on-becoming-a-good-peer-reviewer/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/01/15/ka-ching-2/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/05/29/why-we-plan-or-not/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/11/14/a-thought-provoking-essay-on-teaching-math-in-math-heavy-majors/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/07/20/a-chaos-goblins-guide-to-writing-reader-qa/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/08/26/link-warnings-on-science-assignments/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/12/05/reader-question-where-do-physicists-get-jobs/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/09/01/this-and-that-7/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/09/25/comment-compilation/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/12/02/on-grad-school-applications-musings-from-the-faculty-side/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/04/16/shopping-and-mentoring/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/10/24/updates-and-nablopomo/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/01/07/2020-blog-delurking-week/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/11/21/post-midterm-musings/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/05/15/hugs-and-trips/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/04/01/the-c-word-class/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/08/20/non-sabbatical-and-non-summer-end/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/06/04/the-blmoment/
https://xykademiqz.com/2020/04/19/shit-valley/
xykademiqz 
Blog reading seems to have declined (my blog has dropped from ~116,000 views in 2014 to only 38,578 in 2020), but I don’t know how much of that is due to my writing less. Are you seeing a similar drop?
Just under half of the views my blog gets are from search-engine hits and about a quarter from direct readers (home page and archives). The rest are widely scattered. Do you have a larger fraction of loyal readers? (I would guess so, based on the activity in your comments.)
Excellent question! Here’s the graph of views in different years.
Now broken down by year, number of views (also light blue in graph above)/number of visitors (dark blue in graph above)/number of posts:
2014: 165k/40k/155
2015: 160k/42k/102
2016: 194k/63k/140
2017: 181k/44k/133
2018: 137k/40k/72
2019: 72k/25k/26
2020: 101k/23k/90
A lot of people come from other blogs that have nice blogrolls. I also know that many readers don’t actually come to the website but use a reader with RSS feed or get email alerts to new posts, and I don’t track those (all the numbers are just from basic WordPress stats).
Here are some of the top referrers in 2020.
Interesting to see! Blogger no longer has information on which are the top posts (why?) at notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com, so I can’t tell.