Site, App, and Books: 2023 Year in Review
For the last couple of years I have posted a "Year in Review". You can check out the post for 2021 or 2022. To continue this, I have opted to post another year in review. Here are the statistics for the year for the site, my books, and my apps.
Overview
In October of 2022 I completely changed the entire infrastructure of the site moving away from wordpress and now I use a static site generation package called "Publish" by John Sundell. Having used this method for over a year now, it has provided some insight.
The first thing is that it does take a bit more work to create a new post. It is not the writing of the post itself, because that can take various amounts of time depending on the post, but the extra work comes from the actual generation of the pages. It can take anywhere from 70 seconds to 90 seconds to generate the site. This generation needs to occur everytime that anything is changed.
Because of this, I have actually created a development site. This site takes approximately 2 seconds to fully generate and run. This is the site that I use to write my longer posts because it takes so much less time to generate the entire site. Once I have an article in the state that I want, I then copy and paste it to my live directory and then regenerate the site.
Now, let us look at individual aspects of the site and apps.
Posts
Total Posts: 171. This is approximately 10% fewer posts in 2023 as compared to 2022. Number of "Availability" posts: 113, there were 117 last year, so just a few less. Number of "Non-availability" posts: 48, as compared to 69 in 2022, and 70 in 2023. Reviews: 6 reviews in 2023. There were 7 reviews in 2022, and 12 reviews during 2021.
Total "Review" word count: 24,530, or an average of 4,088.33 words per review. Shortest Review: Super Mario Wonder at 1,264 words Longest Review: Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max at 7,790 words
Total Word Count (not including "availability" posts): 59,087 for an average of 1,053.13 words per post Average Word Count (all posts): 1,089.98 words per post
Most popular post in 2023: Review of the 2nd Generation HomePod - 583 views 2nd most popular review in 2022: Review of the iPhone 15 Pro Max - 442 views
Here are the top 12 posts overall:
- Replacing my AirPort Extreme Routers
- Using Loopback to Output to Multiple Speakers on macOS Simultaneously
- A Review of the 5th Generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro
- "Account Locked" After Updating macOS Big Sur
- Review of the 2nd Generation Homepod
- Review of the iPhone 14 Pro Max
- Apple Introduces Apple Business Connect
- Ongoing Problems that need to be fixed within Apple’s Ecosystem
- macOS Mojave and Websites
- Review of the 14-inch M2 Max MacBook Pro
- Initial Thoughts on the 14-inch M2 MacBook Pro
- Site, App, and Books: 2022 Year in Review
What I find interesting about this list is that five of them are from 2023, three of them are from 2022, three from 2021, and one is from 2018.
Page Views
With changing the entire infrastructure of the site, one thing that needed to change was the mechanism for calculating page views.
Total Page Views from 2016 to 2022 (Wordpress using JetPack plugin):
- 2022: 9,392 (January 1st to October 27th - 300 days) / 31.30 per day.
- 2021: 13,860 / 37.97 per day
- 2020: 9,594 / 26.21 per day
- 2019: 13,475 / 36.91 per day
- 2018: 11,573 / 31.71 per day
- 2017: 29,126 / 79.80 per day
- 2016: 34,166 / 93.35 per day
New Method:
- 2023: 125,836 / 345.71 views per day.
- 2022: 31,337 (October 28th to December 30th - 64 days) / 489.64 views per day.
The new calculation mechanism reads all of the log files and then calculates the total per individual page. This script excludes certain urls, like the upload directories, css files, and any other static files. This script also excludes bots, feed readers, tag pages, the RSS Feed, and similar items. Additionally, it only looks at successful items served, meaning it excludes any 400, 401, 403, 404, 301 and 302 redirects, as well as 500 errors.
Book Statistics
Here are the statistics for the total number of books sold from 2019 to 2022. These are the actual number of books sold across all avenues of sales.
| 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | 181 | 255 | 322 | 475 | 561 | 1,794 |
| Amazon | 13 | 26 | 48 | 130 | 251 | 468 |
| Paperback (B&W) | 41 | 11 | 21 | 32 | 115 | 220 |
| Hardcover/Color Paperback | 3 | 2 | 0 | 8 | 10 | 23 |
| Total | 238 | 294 | 391 | 645 | 937 | 2,505 |
The number of books sold this year is less than last year. I had mentioned last year that it may be prudent to re-evaluate whether or not to do a Kindle version, and I opted to not create a kindle version. I still did manage to sell 13 e-books even without having a new one. The paperback purchaes were up significantly, with 41 paperback books sold.
App Statistics
Last year I launched a second app, "4077: An Unofficial MASH Trivia App".
MASH Trivia
It is a trivia app that covers the classic TV show, M*A*S*H. It requires iOS 16, iPadOS 16, or macOS Ventura (and newer). You can view more information about this on its site: MashTrivia.app, as well as play the web-version of the game.
- 2023: 148
- 2022: 41
This is an increase in downloads, it is not exactly a ton, but it is still a decent number for a game for a single show. You can download it and give your M*A*S*H knowledge a try.
wwriteLite
This year there were only a few updates or wwriteLite, specifically there were 3. Here are the new downloads of wwriteLite per year:
- 2023: 47
- 2022: 49
- 2021: 69
- 2020: 56
- 2019: 66
- 2018: 136
- 2017: 101
- 2016: 132
I cannot say that I am surprised that wwriteLite has gotten fewer downloads this year as compared to last year, but it is very close to last year's downloads. Feel free to download wwriteLite and let me know of any bugs.
Reading Lists
Every month I post my Reading Lists I thought I would add some statistics for those as well. Over 2023 I read 167 titles, 133 of these were distinct titles, and of these, 25 were new titles that I had not listened to previously..
This comes down an average of 13.92 titles overall, 11.08 distinct titles, and 2.08 new titles per month. The month where I listened to the largest number of books was May. During that month I listened to 24 titles listened to, or 0.775 books per day. The last reading list that will be published was actually published earlier today.
Closing Thoughts
A lot has happened this year on the site. I am not sure how best to improve the sales of my books. The trend has been going down since 2019 and I am not sure if there is a way to meaningfully increase that.
I do not know how the web statistics nor app downloads. I am not one who wants to keep posting the same thing again and again because it would annoy any followers, but maybe I will need to post it at different times to be sure that everybody knows about the things I have created.
