Administrivia: Doing the Numbers: 3/2015

Time for another year’s “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report a year ago. Some changes that took place on the site this year:

  • I’ve now added pictures to quite a number of authors; everyone with 5+ quotes in the system, and others as I go along.
  • I have set up a feed of WIST into Facebook. Because, so they say, all the cool kids are doing it.
  • I am manually feeding quotes into Google+, too.

Let’s look at the numbers:

Quotes and Authors 2015

So, yeah, nice, steady progress. Generally speaking I post five quotes a day, every weekday. Sometimes something gets in the way, but by and large it’s been a workable schedule.

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

Quotes and Authors Graph 2015

While I did some author scrubbing early in the year, I’ve also been adding a lot of authors as I go along, day to day.

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

Top 10 Authors 2015

Not a lot of changes this year; the names are all the same, with just a bit of shuffling in the upper ranks (which, as you can see, are very close). 

The Top Ten Author list is shown “live” in the sidebar — as is the Top Ten Visited Quotations list. That shows less movement, since it is cumulative over all time:

  1. – Aeschylus, Agamemnon, l. 179 (4,530, from 4,520)
  2. – Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (4,019, from 3,671)
  3. ↑ John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (3,331, from 2,357)
  4. ↓ James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” Speech, Kalamazoo College (Feb 1960) (2,550, from 2,411)
  5. – Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,430, from 2,206)
  6. – Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (2,400, from 2,002)
  7. ↑ Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993) (1,825, from 1,361)
  8.  Michel de Montaigne, Moral Essays, “On Tranquility of Mind [De Tranquillitate Animi],” 17.10 [tr. W. Langsdorf (1900)] (1,691, from 1,473)
  9. ↓Albert Einstein, (Spurious / Synthetic) (1,660, from 1,572)
  10. ↓ Michel de Montaigne, “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Essays (1588) [tr. D. Frame (1958)] (1,546, from 1,473)

That Molly Ivins quote got a huge bump this last year, for whatever reasons (I suspect someone cited it somewhere, but it’s hard to say).

Unfortunately, I can’t track the most popular items in the last year, but for the last 60 days, per Google Analytics:

  1. John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) – 205 Views
  2. John Kenneth Galbraith,  “Stop the Madness,” Interview with Rupert Cornwell, Toronto Globe and Mail (6 Jul 2002) – 71 Views
  3. Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) – 71 Views
  4. Molly Ivins, “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9 Mar 1993) – 68 Views
  5. Aldous Huxley, “Sermons in Cats,” Music at Night and Other Essays (1931) – 45 Views

So some overlap there, as you might expect. 

Google Analytics shows me my traffic is modestly up this year. I got 32 visitors making 37 visits and viewing 51 pages a day (up from 21, 25, and 34 the preceding year).  So that’s nice.

One thing I did this year was, in addition to my Twitter feed (92 followers), I’m now publishing to Facebook (reaching 0-3 people per post) and Google+ (8 followers). That should boost readership, in theory. 

84% of my visitors are English-speakers, not surprisingly. 60% are in the US; other Top Ten countries include the UK, Canada, India, Brazil, Australia, Germany France, the Netherlands, and Italy.

The majority of my visitors, 41% are using Chrome (that might be due to my use of the site, to be fair); Safari and IE both are 18% of users, and 17% Firefox.

81% of visits come from desktop users; ony 14% mobile and 6% tablet. I’d like to push those numbers up, but it will require extra template work to make happen, since my own template is so heavily customized for the quotation display.

 



 
Added on 10-Mar-15; last updated 10-Mar-15
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