For the last couple of years I have posted a "Year in Review". You can check out the post for 2021, 2022, and 2023. 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: 130. This is approximately 25% fewer posts than in 2024 as compared to 2023. Number of "Availability" posts: 85 for 2024, there were 113 last year, so about 25% fewer posts. Number of "Non-availability" posts: 41. This compares to 48 in 2023, 69 in 2022, and 70 in 2021. Reviews: I wrote 4 reviews in 2024. There were 6 reviews in 2023, 7 reviews in 2022, and 12 reviews during 2021.

Total "Review" word count: 24512, or an average of 6,128.00 words per review. Shortest Review: A Review of the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation at 2,193 words Longest Review: Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max: A Review at 9,423 words

Total Word Count (not including "availability" posts): 46,561 for an average of 1,135.63 words per post Average Word Count (all posts): 1,231.46 words per post

Most popular post in 2024: Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max: A Review - 2,275 views

2nd most popular review in 2024: Review of the Apple M4 13-inch iPad Pro - 972 views

Here are the top 12 posts overall:

1. macOS Mojave and Websites (2018)
2. Replacing my AirPort Extreme Routers (2021)
3. Using Loopback to Output to Multiple Speakers on macOS Simultaneously (2022)
4. Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max: A Review (2024)
5. Review of the Beats Studio Pros (2023)
6. Review of the Apple M4 13-inch iPad Pro (2024)
7. A Review of the 5th Generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro (2021)
8. Apple Sport Loop Band: A Review (2018)
9. "Account Locked" After Updating macOS Big Sur (2021)
10. A Review of Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023)
11. Apple WWDC 2024 Keynote Recap (2018)
12. A Review of the Apple Watch Series 10 (2024)

Much like last year, there is a mix of years. four from 2024, two from 2023, one from 2022, three from 2021, and three 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:

• 2024: 135,570 / 371.43 views per day.
• 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 2024. These are the actual number of books sold across all avenues of sales.

The hardcover sales have never been stellar, so it makes sense that there was not much of change; the same applies to the paperback sales as well. The increase in eBook sales is welcome, but not a significant increase.

App Statistics

Last year I launched a second app called "4077: An Unofficial MASH Trivia App". So let us look at those statistics.

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.

• 2024: 112
• 2023: 149
• 2022: 42

This is a decrease in downloads, of about 25%. But, for a game that is free and gets 1 or 2 updates a year, it is not bad, particularly for a triva 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 single update for wwriteLite. Here are the new downloads of wwriteLite per year:

• 2024: 122
• 2023: 47
• 2022: 49
• 2021: 69
• 2020: 56
• 2019: 66
• 2018: 136
• 2017: 101
• 2016: 132

Unlike last year, I am quite suprised as to why there have been more app downloads for my app. What is most striking is that I did not do an update to the app between August of 2023 and December of 2024. The 2024 update was to remove some features. wwriteLite has been moved to hobby status and will not be receiving that many updates in the future. Even with that, feel free to >download wwriteLite and let me know of any bugs.

Closing Thoughts

A lot has happened this year on the site. Despite selling more copies of my books, the amount is not that much more. As I stated in my post Announcement: Changes to the Website, App, and Books, I have wound down by side business, which will mean no new books.

For website visits, there has been a couple of chnages. The biggest is that both Threads and BlueSky have taken off in terms of popularity. I have been spending more time on both of these, and on Threads my post that referenced my iPhone 16 review did manage to get over 10,000 views, but I do not know how many individual views that garnered. Most of my other posts did not nearly as much attention; but it does seem as though my reviews do seem to do well.