I was flipping through the stats Blogger automatically keeps on the blog, and it made me feel really proud of the writing I do here. This blog has probably been read more than anything else I have ever written, which is an odd feeling, considering that few people know that I do it. My most read posts have almost 28,000 views between them.
Two of the three most popular posts are about non-academic jobs (my first post on this, and my link aggregator page). The third is a Mendeley review from 2011, which is still fairly popular (and actually still reasonably representative of my thoughts on Mendeley, which I still use 5 years later). Rounding out the top 5 are posts on how I got my National Lab job (hint: don't expect what I did to work for you--it was luck!) and how search committees sift through applications (still true). After my top 5, views per post drop pretty steeply (50% drop between #5 and #6, for example). Interestingly, my posts on job searching in various forms are more popular than anything else. After that, it is actually academic misconduct posts which get a lot of views, followed by more detailed interviewing advice in the top 10. From that, I would guess that most of my audience consists of students and/or postdocs.
The most likely path to my blog is through Google, which sends 5X the traffic of the next most common entry point, which is Xykademiqz's old blog (Thanks!).
Most of my audience looks like it comes from the US, with Switzerland a surprising second (at least surprising to me, since I write in English about issues primarily of interest to North American readers). Only 58% of my audience is using Windows, with 26% using Macs. I wonder how that has changed over time. My readers primarily use Firefox and Chrome, which is not too surprising.
The blog averaged about 2300 page views per month while I was on hiatus, which is just astounding. I pretty much started this blog (and keep it going) for my own entertainment. I tend to do advice posts and commentary, since I would have liked to see that sort of thing when I was struggling with the issues I discuss. It is actually really cool and quite surprising to me that so many other people have found it interesting/helpful.
Sad News
1 week ago
3 comments:
Your writing has always been great, I am so glad you are back and writing regularly!
(And this reminds me to update my blogroll at the old and new place!)
I found your blog last year as a first year graduate student (from Xykademiqz's blog) and ended up reading all of your archives because I found it so helpful. I don't normally comment here or over there since I'm still a relatively new grad student and don't have any helpful commentary to add, but I read both of your blogs religiously and was thrilled when you came back from your hiatus! :)
Thanks so much for the nice comments!
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