I am getting close to one year of blogging and I have mixed feelings about it.
Is it worth the time? Is it going well or is it a failure?
I had some exciting times when some posts received 10K+ views, but sometimes it was a bit frustrating seeing that a post that took me 3-4 hours to write then was read by less than 100 views.
So now I am really curious about your stats.
How many followers do you have?
How long do you take to write a post in avarage?
How many views and reactions do you have in total?
What was the post that was best acclaimed?
Which one was the the post that you think deserved more views?
Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash
Top comments (19)
I've been blogging on ohryan.ca for nearly 15 years and other platforms before that. My blog predates twitter so many of my early posts are very short, essentially things I would tweet these days.
For past few year, I've been spending more time writing longer blog posts. I don't pay a lot of attention to stats. I write blog posts because I enjoy the process of writing them. My audience is a handful of friend who I spam with my posts everytime I put one up :D
As an aside, I'd like to encourage everyone to post on a platform you own. dev.to might not be around forever. Or it might not be free forever. My blogging history spans a graveyard of dead (or mostly dead) platforms. If you're a developer, fire up a WordPress blog and cross-post content here. It's important to own your on shit!
true. In 20 years I had around 4-5 different blogs on different platforms.. and for the older posts, I must have just some .txt file saved somewhere in an old drive... :-)
I should really have a look at the dev.to API and back up everything - at least on my Github and then think about crossposting.
Hey @dvddpl , did you find a way to back up the blogs using dev.to API on git?
I think it's worth writing, not for the likes and views, but for the learning process itself. Still stats are interesting. If you know what people liked, most probably you know where you performed well. Though in some cases there can be other factors.
Anyway, if you'd like to have more stats, please try DEV.to Analytics. I wrote a bit more about it here.
How many followers do you have?
7488
How long do you take to write a post on average?
For technical articles, it can be 3-4 hours. For non-technicals, it's about half.
How many views and reactions do you have in total?
115,880 views | 2606 reactions
What was the post that was best acclaimed?
8 books every junior developer should read
Sandor Dargo γ» Mar 16 '18
Which one was the the post that you think deserved more views?
Basically any or my articles, from the C++ STL Algorithms Tutorial series, like this one.
My technical articles are mostly about C++ which is not the in the mainstream in this community, hence those receive relatively few views. But despite, I love to be here.
Just tried your stats tool, still working 4 years after the last commit π
Here is an example for anyone to see (there is non on the Github repo) :
Thanks posting your nice stats, and kudos to the maintainers of the API that my tool can still work.
Feel free to raise a pull request to update the README!
absolutely. I always wrote somehow somewhere, be it blog platforms, or paper "diaries" or simple notes in google drive. To note down my thoughts, feelings, ideas, and especially for technical stuff to remember things or track down the learning path.
It was just curiosity - and finding even more reason to write more , well written, technical articles: because if I write something just for myself it can be just a code snippet and a couple of links, if i want to talk about something, i need to somehow explain it better and double check - investigate the topic way more.
i will definetely try out your Dev.to Analytics!!
and as you wrote in your post :
yes, for motivation and for improving,
not to lead me into driven writing.
How many followers do you have?
1628
How long do you take to write a post on average?
Up to 6 hours including coding experimentations.
How many views and reactions do you have in total?
40,583 views | 760 reactions
What was the post that was best acclaimed?
Things I want to remember about SSH
Which one was the the post that you think deserved more views?
Improving Page Speed with Incremental Loading
Final thoughts
The growth of the views and followers is very organic and I am not trying to push it, except with the blog post series Equivalents in Python and JavaScript. The topic I am writing about (#django) is not so popular on dev.to and for me the most important is to document something that I can later use by myself in the future. If it also helps others, that's some bonus points.
Here on Dev.to I posted my first article in September and currently i'm sitting at:
Overall i'm very happy with the stats and very satisfied.
I usually spend between a couple of hours to a week to write a post, it all depends if it's an article or a tutorial.
Once i'm done i usually post it on my blog and after a couple of days here.
The article that took me longer was my Pomodoro tutorial and the most popular was 5 best free note taking apps, understandably so, as it cover a much broader audience compared to a JavaScript tutorial.
wow. so many followers and views in such a short time. congratulations!
These are mine:
How many followers do you have? 9801
How long do you take to write a post in avarage? 2-3 hours
How many views and reactions do you have in total? 120,327 views | 1700 reactions
What was the post that was best acclaimed? What makes a 10X Developer?
Which one was the the post that you think deserved more views? Keep your ego away from coding
Actually I really don't like to write, but of course I read a lot. (Occupational hazard π) If I write a blog post, I don't really count on the stats. If it is seen only by one person, that's enough... Most of the time I write just to share what I have found by combing through documentations. The sheer happiness of sharing is just enough. (IMHO)
absolutely agree on that.
over the years I have always felt the urge to be writing/blogging.
I never wrote something with the purpose of having an audience nor to make myself visible.
Still seeing that a post has traction, that you receive views/likes/retweets or whatever we want to call it, triggers something deep and the next time you write something you tend to seek for the same gratification. And if you spent lots of time in a post and then nobody reacts to it, then it is a bit frustrating. At least this is what happens to me.
But with this #discuss post I just want to be lightly discussing about numbers and motivation. not bragging neither having more reasons to be frustrated.. :-)
I have almost 3k followers and it still shocks me lol
It depends the post. The most technical I wrote took me about an hour, but my regular ones take me 30 minutes or so.
I have 11k something views in total and 600 something reactions.
My most popular post was a little summarize of concepts of modern JavaScript and since it was the one which I out most work on, it is deserving.
Now, I think that blogging is worth independent of status but depending of why you blog.
I blog to record my journey, so have notes of what I learn and I code to represent women in tech.
Anything else that I get is a bonus.
These are mine
Did you know that as of 2023, there are a whopping 600 million blogs on the internet, making up a significant portion of the 1.9 billion total websites globally?
These blogs come in various forms, spanning from personal reflections to corporate data-driven content across diverse channels and niches.
To put it into perspective, blogs now constitute nearly one-third of all the websites buzzing around the online realm. Quite an impressive and diverse landscape of digital expression!
I have no idea about my stats, because neither do i track nor do i care too much.