Another year of blogging has passed, now is the time to look back, look at some numbers and think a bit about the coming of a bright new year .
Looking Back
In 2017, I posted 16 articles. The majority of them (7) were stats and/or R-related, showing how to perform a certain kind of analysis in R or how to interpret some model outputs. This year I also had a couple of posts where I reflected a bit on some personal experiences something that I rarely do here. Prediction in ecology was also a (big) thing this year, I wrote two posts on this topic. So blog-wise I alternated between an R-related and something else post. It worked pretty well and I guess I’ll continue like this. This year was also a year of changes, I defended my thesis in March (yeah!) and moved to a new position / country in April.
Readership dynamic
In terms of monthly page views the numbers grew quite a lot this year:
I was not expecting this since I did not publish more in 2017, and most of the views went to older articles.
In terms of article views the top 5 for this year is:
- Interpreting two-way interactions
- Checking (G)LM assumptions
- Generalized Linear Mixed Models in Ecology
- Interpreting random effects (published in 2017)
- Using and interpreting different contrasts in linear models
It is pretty cool that one article published this year made it to the top 5, it also seems that posts explaining how to interpret stats seems to be in high demand. I actually like writing such posts because it forces me to think through what I think I know, so more might come.
In terms of visits per country here is the top 5 for this year:
| Country | Total views | Proportion (%) |
| US | 23110 | 34 |
| UK | 6441 | 9 |
| Germany | 4551 | 6 |
| Canada | 3648 | 5 |
| Australia | 2743 | 4 |
So mostly US and western world (english-speaking) countries. To put this in a different angle, visits came to the blog from 176 countries but 50% of the visits came from only three countries: US, UK and Canada (so if you are good in math you can deduce from this the total number of page view this year 🙂 ).
What to expect in 2018
Some changes will happen next year, first of all I am moving this blog to a new website: https://lionel68.github.io/blog/, which will make it easier for me to post. Right now the formatting of code snippet and equation is a pain. With the new site I will be able to make posts in markdown, which is way closer to my regular workflow. biologyforfun will still be there but all new articles will come on the .io website. This also makes it easier for me to update the posts, sometime some readers discover mistakes or ask for extensions and it is waaay easier to do this in a git workflow.
Regarding posts I will continue to alternate between stats / R related posts and opinion or personal experience posts. Some themes will certainly be: prediction in ecology, transition from PhD to PostDoc, using github, biodiversity dynamics …
My lab started a blog recently (http://www.ecology.ugent.be/terec/blog.php) so all my work-related news will be posted there like new publications or conference summaries.
A few thanks
I’d like to finish by thanking you all, even if you just visit these pages for time to time, it is deeply gratifying to see that some people do actually read these pages. Do not hesitate to comment on the posts sometime your questions inspire me to write new posts (like this one). I am also always looking for ideas, so if you have some suggestions for a post feel free to contact me.
Happy new year!
biologyforfun 