Are You Being Surveyed?

I really enjoyed reading the results from the last survey that I ran through this blog. It's been about six months since then, so I think now is as good a time as any to run another one.

So, o reader mine, click here if you want share your thoughts and opinions.

If that particular paracausal statement wasn't quite enough to convince you, then keep reading for some musings and statistics. Be warned though, if meta-blog posts aren't your thing, then you're not going to like what comes next.

Getting Down To The Gritty-Nitty

This blog is a hair away from its one year anniversary, the first blog post being published on the 7th May, 2021.

Since then, I've written 48 posts, which is almost a post a week. I took a bit of a break over the 2021 Christmas period, which was great, but it kind of wrecked the consistency of the numbers.

In those posts, I've written a total of 53,284 words. Apparently, the average book is 90,000 words long, so I can't really say that I've written a book yet. A book would be harder anyway, because the words that I do write, don't have to go together to form a cohesive whole.

The average number of words per post is now ~1100 words, with the shortest post being a quick notification about some charity streaming that I was doing (~150) and the longest being a summary of a project I ran that aimed at establishing regular and transparent salary reviews (~1700).

Each blog post still takes me a little over 2 hours to write, start to finish, and I've invested a total of 112 hours writing.

Considering I've spent over 200 hours playing Elden Ring since it was released in late February 2022, it's clear I've got my priorities straight. Or maybe not, depending on how you look at it.

I Couldn't Help Overhearin' Your Conversation

I have 13 subscribers these days, which is a fancy way of saying that 13 people let me email them my blog posts each week. Since the last time I looked at this stuff (i.e. the original survey blog post) that's an increase of ~40%.

According to Google Analytics, I have ~55 30-day users. Again, comparing to last time, that's about a 40% increase. As you can see from the chart below, it goes up and down depending on a variety of different factors, but in general it seems to be rising steadily, if slowly.

I'm a little bit better at using Google Analytics now, so I also know a bit about how readers arrive for the first time. I'm honestly not sure what (direct) means in the scheme of things, but the rest of the sources are pretty easy to understand.

LinkedIn is the clear winner, with nothing else really coming close. Next is the internal Atlassian Confluence instance, followed by search engines and then...Trello? Not sure what to do with that tidbit of information.

Waaaaaay down the bottom is Twitter, which is an experiment that I've been doing where I tweet a few times a week attempting to drum up interest.

It's not very effective by the looks of it.

Now, I know pretty much every single subscriber personally, which is great. PS, you're all awesome.

But I don't know much about the rest of my readers.

There Is No Need To Lie To Me, I Work Here

As I get older, I've come to the conclusion that while I may be fully capable of squatting in a darkened cave and ignoring the rest of the world, I'm better when I don't do that.

It turns out that feeling connected to people, listening to them, and understanding their experiences, hopes and dreams is a pretty great feeling. Like icing on an already pretty good cake.

Plus, anyone who bothers to read the words that I vomit forth is worth knowing more about. I mean, what sort of crazy person does that?

What sort of things interest you, o reader mine? What do you care about? How has your life been going recently? Have you learned anything as a result of coming here?

I can't easily ask these sorts of things directly, because I don't know who most of you are. Thus, a survey.

I know, I know, I could (and should) implement some sort of comments system on the blog itself. A number of you even mentioned this in the last survey and it's definitely on my list. But my list is long and I get tired sometimes, so this is the best I can do right now.

If you give me a few moments of your time, and fill out the survey, I can promise you that I will read every single word.

And I'll learn more about you as a result.

I'll Have You Know, I'm Perfectly Sober

I like the act of writing.

There is a certain music to a well written series of words, and it's fun to try and find it.

It also helps me work through things, whether it be forming up an idea or opinion or just screaming into the void trying to make sense of my weird brain or the uncaring universe that it lives in.

So, I'm pretty happy with this blog.

It still feels like an obligation sometimes, and I honestly don't know how long I'll keep it up, but at the end of the week when something that I've written gets published into the series of tubes that is the internet, I feel pretty good.

But it's even better when another person reads it and takes something positive away. Maybe it's a shared experience, maybe it's a deeper understanding of the writer, or maybe it's the seed of an idea that will one day blossom into something amazing.

So, if you want to help me understand more about you, clicky clicky.