WordPress’s spectacular New Year present: the fireworks of 2013, an animated annual report of each blogpost represented as a firework, with the splash it made represented by the number and duration of stars. They did this last year, too.
This year I published 72 blogposts – that would average out to five a month, which would be not bad if I’d been that regular, but I wasn’t. (Resolutions for 2014 include planning to blog daily again, with a generic exemption for July for reasons that will become clear later.)
The blogposts that got most hits in 2013:
- March 2013: Iain Duncan Smith: the quiet man with so much to be quiet about
- March 2013 again: Michael Gove: Flipper
- February 2013: Reeva Steenkamp is dead
- January 2013: Prolife Ireland talking bollocks
- August 2012: Religious freedom in the workplace
- September 2012: Maldives are rubbish
- March 2013: Labour’s roll of shame on workfare
- December 2012: How not to help food banks
- January 2012: Chris Grayling recommends slave labour
- December 2013: Wow, That Took Off Quickly
Last year I noted that I had two outlier posts that had got the most hits of the year simply because they’d been tweeted by Graham Linehan, who has a quarter-million followers. Those two posts are still in my top six of all time – but the other four posts in that short list (all of them with 6000+ hits) are:
- Iain Duncan Smith: the quiet man with so much to be quiet about
- Michael Gove: Flipper
- Maldives are rubbish
- Reeva Steenkamp is dead
My guess is that until IDS and Gove leave office, those two posts of mine are going to keep getting hits – they do, every time either minister says something particularly wicked or stupid.
If I were only going to count a top ten of posts blogged in 2013, the list would be:
- March: Iain Duncan Smith: the quiet man with so much to be quiet about
- March again: Michael Gove: Flipper
- February: Reeva Steenkamp is dead
- January: Prolife Ireland talking bollocks
- March once more: Labour’s roll of shame on workfare
- December: Wow, That Took Off Quickly
- June: BBC Question Time: why you should complain
- December again: Question Time Johannesburg
- June again: Some men don’t like women to answer back
- April: Grave for Thatcher
I didn’t blog at all in May. I’m not sure why.
For the other months:
- July: Iain Duncan Smith is proud of this
- August: Words are worthless
- September: Shouting in the street
- October: Paul Dacre Fisked
- November: Daily Mail, Leveson, & Ms Jack Monroe
A handful of other posts I’m particularly pleased with:
- July: George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin
- April: Glenda Jackson leads the Labour Party – Not a particularly good blog post, but I really, really wish Glenda Jackson were going to be the next Prime Minister instead of Ed Miliband.
- November: Undecided Leith
- September: Lies, Hobnobs, and Huhne
- October: How Not To Help Foodbanks, Update
- November again: how I lost my backpack, my mobile phone, and my Nook
- Two posts I liked in 2012 and still like this year: Magnetic Girls Talk and Why are we fat?
- From nearly two years ago – Sherlock: Irene Adler is THE woman – and this time last year: The Hobbit: Unexpectedly Three Movies
- And one blogpost from February this year that I wish I could keep pointing people at when they tell me that they know I’ve decided how to vote in the referendum (I haven’t): Undecided Scot Decides
As of 31st December, I have 2068 followers on Twitter. Can’t remember how many I had this time last year. Hello to you all.
Now I’m off to see The Desolation of Smaug, which struck me as being a most appropriate film to summarise 2013.
