My recent post, 20 years working on the same software product, finally got this blog past 3 million page views:

And it only took me 18 years! I know some people wouldn’t get out of bed for 3 million views, but that isn’t going to stop me bragging about it.

I haven’t really done much to promote the blog, apart from occasionally posting links to Hacker News.

The yearly hits have gone down over time. Mostly because I have been writing less often. These days I have 3 products to keep me busy. But also blogs are less of a ‘thing’ than they used to be.

Here are the 20 most visited posts:

Probably the high point for the blog was the software awards scam post getting a mention in the Guardian newspaper.

The low point was when WordPress accidentally shut down the blog.

Power laws are very much in evidence, with the top 1% of the posts accounting for 18% of the hits. I have been consistently wrong in guessing which posts would be popular.

Was all that effort, writing articles worth 35k (of untargetted) clicks throughs to my PerfectTablePlan website? Probably not directly. Even when people did click through to my product websites, the engagement was often very low. But I am guessing that the improved domain authority from links to my seating plan software website has been helpful in improving search rank (see what I did there?). Promoting my products was never the only aim of the blog anyway.

Some posts I have written were mostly notes to my future self. And there have been several cases where Googling for an answer sent me to an article on my own blog that I had fogotten having written.

I have accepted a few guest posts. But I have been extremely picky about which guest posts to accept. I have also turned down plenty of offers for paid links.

Here is where the traffic came from, by source:

I was quite suprised by how much traffic has come from stumbleupon.com.

Digg.com, remember them?

Google completely dominates the search engine results, with Bing managing a pitiful 2.6% of search engine hits. Presumably from people too lazy or ‘non technical’ to change their Windows defaults.

Here is the traffic, by country:

Very little traffic came from Africa, South America or Asia:

Of course, it is hard to know how much of the traffic is humans and how much is bots.

There have been some 37k non-spam comments:

Quite a lot of the comments are responses by me. I have also learnt a lot of useful stuff through feedback on the blog and discussions, when links were posted to places like Hacker News. But the number of comments on the blog has markedly decreased, even taking account of the overall decrease in traffic. On the plus side, I have a lot less comment spam to deal with. It was quite overwhelming at one point. This is a comment from the blog in 2008:

I have given up looking through the spam logs. There is just too much of it and one can only read so many spam comments about Viagra and bestiality without becoming profoundly depressed about the human condition.

Thankfully WordPress seem to have greatly upped their game on spam detection since then.

Here is the top 20 sites where the traffic went:

The ‘social capital’ from the blog has been useful for promoting my consulting services and the training course I ran. Also for promoting various charitable and other causes I felt worthwhile.

I have a vague idea that I might, one day, write a book about starting a small software company. If I do, I will certainly mine the blog for material.

PS/ No, tiresome ‘SEO experts’, I still don’t want to put your boring, crappy guest post ‘articles’ with their dodgy links on my blog. So please don’t waste both our time by asking.