700

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This is a special milestone: 700th post, after 14 years of blogging here.

700 posts is a lot of blogging. But that comes down to 50 posts per year, which is one post a week, totally doable, right?

If I can get another 14 years of blogging at this rate, I will get to 1400. That is more than the EWD documents in terms of the sheer number of posts, not that I am comparing my posts with EWD documents. (BTW, of course I had a blog post about the EWDs.) 

I hope I can go for many more years, because I do enjoy this. Writing in the open and getting occassional feedback is nice. But I don't do it for the feedback. I wrote about "Why I blog" recently, so I am not going to rehash that topic.

Instead a good use of this post may be to serve as an index to other posts in this blog. I noticed I keep referring people to my previous posts where I covered a question before. 700 posts is a lot of posts, so maybe an index at this snapshot can help people get more out of this blog.

Let's start with the annual "year in review" posts. These come in December, and point back to some popular and interesting posts among the 50+ posts that year.  

If you scan those annual recaps, you notice the trend. This blog has a lot of distributed systems and database systems paper reviews, many TLA+ posts, some production systems paper posts, and some miscellaneous category posts.      

Here is a tip for finding interesting posts in this blog. See the left side bar, at the bottom it says "topics". Click on it, and it will show all tags/labels in this blog, along with how many posts were tagged with that label. If you click on a label it will bring all posts with that label. For example, clicking on "distributed consensus (47)" brings up this page. "TLA(51)" is probably one of the most used tags in this blog.

I haven't been consistent with my use of tags, but this is still a useful way to navigate old posts.

Several people told me they read my blog only for the occasional research-advice or miscellaneous posts. Turns out I have 50 posts under the research-advice label. In 2020, I had written an index post on research-advice posts, and this may be a good place to get started. You can then use the tag-link above to catch up on the posts after 2020.  

I had 29 posts under writing label which discusses mechanics, concept, and tips/tricks for writing. 

54 book reviews. Unfortunately, I haven't been consistent with my book reviews. I go through a lot of audiobooks but fail to add reviews for them. Ah, maybe this is not so bad, this means I am never scraping the barrel for post topics, and I keep myself busy posting on other distributed systems and database topics.

31 trip reports. Again, I have been inconsistent with this tag. I should have been more tidy.


OK, some statistics now.

My most prolific months had been November 2017 and December 2017, with 15 posts each. Jeez, what brand of coffee was I on then? That is a post every other day. Well I was at SUNY Buffalo there, and there was less pressure on my time. 

Now for some real stats. Here are some pageview alltime big hitters.

I had written "Hints for Distributed Systems Design" in Oct 23, it laid dormant for many months, but somehow started picking crazy traffic in July, which seems to be over now. It is at 195K pageviews, and I have zero idea where the traffic came from. Maybe it is google search, I don't know. The blogspot stats are not picking the source, and the google analytics link... don't get me started on that. I don't think anyone was able to successfully setup and use google analytics ever. What kind of a twisted committee is responsible for that Google Analytics Monstrosity? I get an empty page, with hard to follow buttons, instructions. I think at one point I buried half a day to make some sense of it and set it up, but I gave up. 

Here are some more all time hit posts.

And here are popular posts from within last year.

These stats have no point or moral. They don't make much sense to me. I don't think it is a good idea to try to identify and target popular topics for posts. Best thing is to write and get things off your chest, and put a note down for history (well internet archive).

I hope our AI overlords would be nice to me and my kin, because I provided a lot of content for their training. Hi! I am a friend.

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