Two year Anniversary
It’s hard to believe it’s been two years already! This past year started off well but tapered off fairly quickly. My goal was to do a video and blog post once every two weeks. So far, I’ve done 11 videos and posts. I was hoping to be closer to 26.
I’ve been reflecting on what happened that caused me to fall far short of my goal. I spent a lot of time consulting, took a few vacations with my family, and have also taken on leadership roles in my oldest son’s extracurricular activities. While these do take up time I still had one or two hours every morning that I could have used to produce content.
I think the primary issue is that I’ve always struggled with motivation in my personal life. Usually, I will prefer to relax and play games or aimlessly surf the endless web. These are mindless activities and I’m not sure how to break this habit. I suppose on one hand I do work hard at my job and do spend quality time with my family, so I should be allowed downtime to “recharge”. But, I can’t help but feel that I can, and should, be a bit more productive during this time. I do wonder if others struggle too, if they consider it a problem, and how they deal with it. Regardless, I need to figure out what I can do or if I should do anything here.
The secondary issue is the amount of time that goes into creating content. I’ve always had a hard requirement of producing a companion video for every blog post. The amount of time and effort that goes into this is easily 6 to 8 hours per piece of content. Given my reduced free time moving forward, I may experiment with breaking this rule and release a solitary video or blog post. If anything, it could help me get back into the swing of things.
Anyway, Let’s move on to analytics.
This past year there was a significant drop in users towards the end of December 2018. This is the time I added a GDPR plug-in to my site to comply with European laws. I don’t believe it’s necessary since I live in the States, but I think it is a good idea. The idea behind this plug-in is it opens a message at the bottom of the screen informing the viewer of the use of cookies before it loads any tracking code. So, the drop in users is likely due to individuals (or bots?) closing the site without scrolling down or clicking “Ok”. For me, this is fine and better reflects my actual visitors. Overall, the trend continues to climb, albeit slowly. This is not unexpected.
Compared to last year, there are more returning visitors (2,322 vs 1,658) and fewer new visitors (8,455 vs 10,551). Again, it is not unexpected that the number of new visitors is lower due to the aforementioned plug-in.
Based on this screenshot, we can see that my articles about installing JDBC drivers into Wildfly are still the most popular ones on the site. What surprised me the most though is that the Express / Typescript / Mongo articles are so far behind!
Anyway, that’s all I have to share for now. Until next time!
