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Thoughts After a Year of Blogging

Original Post - 07 Sep 2020 - Michael H. Scott

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Here are some random thoughts from the blog’s first year.

Prior to my first post, which was insubstantial and lame, I came up with about 45 ideas for posts of actual substance and saved them in my Drafts folder. Some of the ideas were, and still are, junk and will never be published. But, even with a large number of post ideas, I worried that I wouldn’t have enough material to sustain the blog for more than a few months.

Now, I have made 52 posts and my Drafts folder has increased to 66 ideas. Some ideas are new, others have sat around from the initial 45. I’ve learned that Robert Boice was correct–the more you write, the more ideas you generate.

The numbers of views and visitors (counted by WordPress) for those 52 posts are shown below.

With these numbers, I won’t make any money off the blog any time soon. If making money was the objective, I would have given up after a few months. However, the numbers are not bad for year one of a blog about OpenSees, a niche topic in earthquake engineering.

I share the posts on Twitter, ResearchGate, and LinkedIn–the same places other researchers share their latest journal articles. I also link to relevant posts on the OpenSees message board and on the OpenSees GitHub page.

It’s a good sign that the number of referrals from search engines has increased in the last few months. For the record, I don’t do SEO. Inconsistent OpenSees documentation is all the SEO I need.

But the most interesting thing to me is derived from comparing the word count to the number of views.

The total word count, 24,862, is equivalent to about two journal articles. Over 18,000 views in one year on two journal articles worth of material? Yes, please!