Since I started blogging back in November 2012, I like to do an annual recap at the end of each year. The year 11 recap has been delayed, but you know what they say – better late than never!

Here’s a look back at the year that was in 2023, and the site and blogging plans for the remainder of this year.

Year 11

At the end of 2023, there were over 660 published posts since inception. While I’d like to publish at least 100 posts a year, averaging 60 is a reasonable number that I’m happy with. I’m still hoping for a year or two when life won’t get in the way, and I’ll have the discipline and motivation to achieve my elusive posting goal of 100 for the year.

Blog traffic

Traffic is harder to analyze this year due to Google’s forced upgrade to Google Analytics 4. I’m (still) getting my bearings in the GA-4 reporting interface, but from what I could tell it looks like there were just under 50,000 visits to the site in 2023. That’s down a touch from the numbers in 2022 but above the historical averages. On a cumulative basis since starting the blog, there’s been over 330,000 visits which is far higher than I would have ever expected.

I’ve noted my observations and lessons learned around the traffic numbers. Instead of repeating those notes here, which haven’t changed, I’ll refer you to last year’s traffic review which you can find by clicking here.

Blogging frequency

2023 was on the lighter side for blogging with just 41 posts. Here’s the breakdown by year, dating back to 2013:

2013	71
2014	73
2015	59
2016	57
2017	36
2018	24
2019	93
2020	96
2021	60
2022	50
2023	41

Breaking 2023 down by month shows the activity was “bursty” in nature. There were months were I was on a roll, and then there were the months where life took over.

January	10
February	0
March	6
April	2
May	3
June	0
July	3
August	7
September	0
October	4
November	1
December	5

Popular posts

One of my favorite things to do in the recap is to look at popular posts over time. Unfortunately, the change in Google’s analytics platform has made this analysis too challenging to do in the same level of detail. So for this year, these were the posts that were viewed the most in 2023:

1. Social media: Bringing us together or pulling us apart?
2. Amazon Linux 2: Upgrading from PHP 7.2 to PHP 7.4
3. Installing DD-WRT on the TP-LINK TL-WR841N
4. Amazon Linux 2: Installing ImageMagick for PHP 7.4
5. Sourdough Hydration
6. Half Moon Bay: Old Course vs Ocean Course
7. Optimizing Apache and php-fpm settings for EC2 micro and nano instances serving WordPress websites
8. Pacific Coast Bike Route – Ventura to Carpinteria
9. Fixing ‘Invalid argument supplied for foreach()’ PHP Warning in WordPress
10. Book review: The Power of Positive Thinking

It’s always interesting to see the types of posts that get the most traffic. The majority of the list is populated with technical articles. It’s nice to see a book review made the list. It’s also interesting to note that none of these articles were published in 2023. In fact, one of the articles dates back to 2015! It reinforces my view that strong content drives website traffic and that trying to game the search engine algorithms is a short-term ploy that is not sustainable.

Plans for the remainder of 2024

Needless to say, 2024 has gotten off to a slow start for the blog. There’s multiple reasons (aka excuses) this has happened, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to update and reorganize the website to get me focused on more regular posting.

As part of the redesign, I want to break the blog up into different parts. Some will be kept as part of this site, and some will be moved to new sites that will have a more specific focus. This is what the new format will look like:

• The main blog on this site will be a life journal, which was the original intent when I started.
• The book reviews are going to be moved to a separate area of this blog where I can highlight my must reads, fun reads, and recently finished books. By splitting these into a separate section, there’s a better chance I can keep up with posting a review when I finish reading a book. Currently, I have a backlog of over 30 book reviews to publish.
• Existing and new technical posts will be moved to a new site. The site will be related to the software consulting business I started in 2022, MavTech Consulting. Content migration will happen once the website for MavTech is live.
• Finally, I want to create another site that details my experiences with sourdough, baking and roasting coffee beans. In addition to providing tips and suggestions to those getting started, I also plan to share some of my favorite recipes and coffees.

These are ambitious plans for the remainder of the year, especially given events that are going on in both my personal and professional life. However, it feels good to have a plan to get things back on track. The key is staying focused and executing.

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And that’s a wrap for 2023. There’s exciting things in the works which will hopefully make it into the recap for 2024!