Time for some self-indulgence! Back in March 2012 I started posting on Blogger but switched to the far superior WordPress.com within a month, and then to a self-hosted WordPress setup in April 2013. Since I only have WordPress stats from April 2012 onward and didn’t write a year-end review in 2013, I’ll combine both years in the following statistics. So here are this blog’s greatest hits, according to WordPress visitor tracking.
- Rise of Nations on Windows 8 is undisputed king with 11,766 views. I’m happy that so many people still know and play this great classic of strategy games!
- No .NET 4.5 for XP/2003 got 7,654 views from enterprise developers who couldn’t believe Microsoft would abandon them.
- JavaFX on iOS & Android is a late entry that instantly shot to 3,350 views. It’s a niche within a niche, but the Java universe is so huge that even its niches are pretty big.
- .NET 4.5 & Windows SDK 8.0 got 2,118 views, which is somewhat inexplicable since all I’m doing is briefly checking out that upgrade.
- Asus Xonar DGX on Windows 8 hopefully helped 2,051 viewers decide on buying and configuring their discrete sound card.
- Civilization V Fall Patch refers to the big 2012 update, so most of its 1,999 views are from that year. (I should have put Gods & Kings in the title, sorry!)
- Quest for EML Viewers was another surprise with 1,788 views. There’s still a ton of interest for these decidedly unsexy applications.
- Fall Patch for Civ5 Brave New World covers the big 2013 update for the final expansion and got 1,549 views.
- Windows 8.1 DPI Scaling Promises told 1,314 viewers that these promises were mostly hot air, as users soon discovered for themselves.
- Fixing Windows Programming had 1,290 views for showcasing DPI scaling failures and generally lamenting the state of the Windows ecosystem.
Additionally, the blog’s front page got 4,667 views. As usual with statistics compiled from JavaScript visitor tracking, views from RSS feeds or by visitors who disable JavaScript or block tracking scripts are not counted. WordPress.com is also usually blocked in China, and seems to have entirely dropped statistics for some early posts. With these caveats, total views for 2012 stand at 11,151 which increased nearly five-fold to 53,327 in 2013.
Since I’ve added Google Analytics in September 2013, I’ll get my statistics for 2014 and future years from there. Meanwhile, here’s what GA says about the last 3.5 months of 2013 regarding the most popular static pages on my main website:
- High DPI Settings in Windows got 11,337 views, matching the most popular blog post in one third of the time. This topic will only get hotter as pixel densities keep increasing.
- .NET Struct Performance is a microbenchmark that got 3,243 views, mostly due to being briefly reddited after getting linked in an MSDN discussion.
- WPF Drawing Performance is still holding strong at 2,711 views, probably because Microsoft’s attempt to push developers to WinRT has utterly failed.
- Check .NET Version with Inno Setup is another evergreen with 1,948 views, once again for technologies Microsoft wants to bury.
- DPI Scaling in Windows GUIs got 705 views as a developer adjunct to main article on high DPI settings.
- Civilization V Manual Addenda still got 676 views, even though I don’t really cover Brave New World which lacks a proper manual.
- Java for C# Programmers proved as popular as I suspected, with 632 views already. Java is thriving, not dying.
- LaTeX Typesetting with MiKTeX told 631 viewers about my PDF production setup. Like Java, TeX is an unkillable technology.
- Hexkit, my frozen but fully functional strategy game system, attracted 568 views.
- Comment Reflower for Visual Studio is another older project that got 467 views.
All told, GA recorded 27,784 page views which would scale up to over 95,000 views for the entire year. Let’s see if we can break 100,000 views next year…