Didn't I just write the 2016 statistics post like... last week? Another year has flown by and with it another year of attempting to prioritize my writing. I'll be honest, I'm not optimistic about what I'm going to find when I compare 2017 to 2016. It was a year filled with a lot of change and opportunity so I'll use that as my excuse as to why I didn't write as much or as often as I had planned.

I was thinking though: every year I set a goal of writing more posts than the previous year, but that's only 1 metric to go by. Most of my posts are very detailed and fleshed out. It's nothing to write a post that's 1000 words. I regularly eclipse 2000 words and have even hit 3000 words. Perhaps I should be thinking more about word count and not post count? Certainly a 2000 word post takes more effort than a 1000 word post. On the other hand, word count says nothing about quality and could easily lead to excessive wordiness and run-on posts just to tilt the metrics.

Enough musing. Let's review the data!

Happy New Year! I just realized the other day that this blog turned 5 years old in 2016. It's been a lot of fun and has paid me back for my time in terms of building my brand and being a means to explore and learn new topics. I have plans to put more focus on my writing in 2017 and reduce the friction between starting with a blank page and hitting that "Publish" button.

Anyways! Here's a look back at 2016 on packetmischief.ca.

Happy New Year! As is my tradition, here are the 2015 blog statistics as compared to 2014.

I'm pretty excited that once again readership and overall reach of this blog has increased by double digits. I'm looking forward to growing these numbers and creating challenging and interesting new content in 2016.

Although I wasn't actively blogging this year, I've still been tracking views on the site and keeping an eye on number of visitors. I am looking forward to blogging again in 2015 so I wanted to collect the 2014 viewership statistics so I had something to compare to at the end of 2015.

Despite the lack of new content, I'm pretty happy that people are reading the existing articles and continue to post comments and email me questions. Please keep them coming!

I debated whether to write an article like this. It seems to be the "in vogue" thing to do if you're a blog author but I wasn't inclined to do it until I started looking at the data (I heart data). When I started looking at the data, I saw not only number of visitors and so on to the blog, but a breakdown of browser versions and operating systems (thank you Google Analytics for the rich reports). As is often the case, your data set can tell you more than you initially bargained on.