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:

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):

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?

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.