10 Year Blogiversary

Muskblog has been online since 2005, the exact date it first went live is lost in the mists of time but the oldest post dated to September 18th 2005. September 2015 also marks the 20th anniversary of me putting a homepage online. Twenty years of hand coding HTML. Twenty years of web analytics. Twenty years of searching the Internet for cool content and features to add to my website. That is a lot of time and effort and I can not say it has paid off.

However over those 20 years a lot of people have surfed on through especially in the last ten years with WordPress and Google Analytics I have a lot of data confirming this. I never set out to be popular. In fact some would say I’ve gone out of my way to be unpopular in my pursuit of honesty. Maybe I am older and wiser now, but I’m still alone and living in China, so not much has really changed in the last ten years.

While analyzing the data I came up with two ways to measure popular posts, a method that measures Timeliness and a method that measures Timelessness. Timely posts are the most popular post published during that calendar year. A statistician would note that posts published earlier in the year are more likely to win under this methodology. I’ve also removed posts, even popular posts, so for 2007 the third most timely blog post ‘won’ as the other two have since been removed.

Another way to look at popularity is to see what is still popular now, these are posts that have a Timeless Quality, they were published up to ten years ago but are still being read today. Only 2005 and 2015 had the same post rise to the top under both methodologies. Though I suspect 2015’s data will change over time, maybe I’ll have to update this post at the end of the year.

Needless to say below are blog posts you might want to read, 100,000s of random web surfers can’t all be wrong. The posts have likely been edited and updated since their original publication and who knows maybe some of my search engine optimization efforts and taxonomy improvements made a difference. But I also removed a lot of content to try and improve the overall Quality of my blog.

Timely and Timeless Blog Posts

I even worked in an HTML table and dug around for an old cheesy logo made with rudimentary Photoshop skills in the 1990s and updated it with even more rudimentary photo editing techniques. And for the pièce de résistance a vintage web banner. Hearty congratulations and pathetic insults can be left below.

My Top Post for 2015

I’m disappointed with my top post for 2015, indeed the last several years hasn’t seen enough Quality or perhaps it is a lack of hashtags and self promotion, I’m not all about the #instafame but I am hopeful the thousands of hours I’ve put into blogging and building websites will pay off in 2016.

I’ve continued to be active on social media, despite being behind the Great Firewall but I don’t blog much anymore. I can’t say it has helped my career and it is harder and harder to keep code up-to-date, but on Twitter the other day I learned that bloggers are writers. This blog has been online well over ten years and I’ve been self publishing to the Internet considerably longer than that, still no book deal, still negligible career benefits. I am once again looking for a better job and despite passing all three CFA exams, all I seem to get is ignored, so I have to continue to caution against blogging your way to a better career.

This entry was originaly posted on September 7th, 2015, it was last edited on February 9th, 2023 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Analytics, Blogging, Blogiversary, Popularity, WordPress.