Five years of blogging

Today marks five years since my first blog post. This post is my 100th. It summarizes the words I’ve used and traffic I’ve received.

Words used

My first 99 posts contained more than 56 thousand words:

I wrote 11 posts in March and April 2020, when the pandemic forced me to “work” from home. I’ve written 56 posts—about once every 16 days—since starting my PhD in September 2020.

My longest post had 2,128 words and my shortest had 123. The most common (non-stop) word was “network,” used 269 times across 34 distinct posts. The chart below shows the six most common words overall and among posts on my most common topics. It includes “datum” rather than “data” because I lemmatize words before counting them.

So far I’ve written 34 posts on economics and 31 on networks. Most posts had multiple topics. The most commonly paired topics were networks and research (eight posts), research and software (six posts), and networks and statistics (six posts).

Traffic

Since March 2020 I’ve used GoatCounter to count page views and visitors. I had lots in late 2022, when I shared my reflections on graduate school and people started applying to economics PhD programs:

My most popular three posts benefit from being in the top few Google search results. They account for about half of my (non-bot) page views:

Most of my visitors were from the USA (usually California or Massachusetts):