This blog's history in numbers

I intend to close down Skeptic's Play very soon, and move to another blog called A Trivial Knot.  Now that I'm wrapping things up, I thought it might be interesting to summarize my statistics.

We can also correlate the statistics with a few major events in my life:
Late 2009: I came out as gray-A
Mid 2010: I graduated with a BS in Physics, and started physics grad school
Mid 2012: I launched The Asexual Agenda 
Mid 2014: I moved in with my boyfriend

In terms of page views, Skeptic's Play saw initial growth in the first couple years, and then it leveled off.  Initially, it might appear that coming out as asexual greatly increased my page views, and then after The Asexual Agenda was launched, those eyeballs shifted to the other blog.

But in fact, the drop in 2013 can be traced to a different event entirely.  On exactly January 1st, 2013, I saw a precipitous drop in search engine hits, particularly on this particular page.  This coincides with a big change in Google's search algorithm.  I'm not sorry for it, since people just wanted to use an image I posted.  It just goes to show how meaningless page views can be.

When I initially started blogging, I was much more prolific, basically because I was enthusiastic about this new hobby.  This fell over time, but soon leveled off.  Recently, in 2015, there's been an uptick in the number of posts.

Finally, when we look at the word count per post, there's been a very slow and steady increase in time, except in the last year.  I was surprised by this, since I recall many times over the years when I've set out to write shorter and sweeter posts.

In total, there were about 605,000 page views, 1,188 posts, and 642,000 words (as of last month).  For comparison, The Lord of the Rings is about 450,000 words, and the entire Harry Potter series is just over a million words.