I Accidentally Blogged For A Year

I wish I could say I did this intentionally. I wish I could say I set goals and willed myself to blog consistently for a year. Nope. In fact, the only time I tried to do a post every day, as part of a bet with Wesley Zhao, I failed miserably. But the first post I made here was on February 26th 2011, and it is now February 29th 2012. I’ve posted here 83 times in that span, or an average of one post every four days. So I guess it’s official: I accidentally blogged for a year.

So how did do? Let’s dive into some stats:

Posts: 83

Unique Visitors: 59,921

Average Time on Page: 3 minutes and 12 seconds

Unique Pageviews: 78,848

Not bad going from 0 to almost 60,000 visitors in a year. But where did they come from? Here are the top 10 (of 548) sites linking to this blog over the past year:

Hacker News has been by far the biggest source of traffic. It’s an amazing community and I owe almost everything that has happened over the past year to the people on that site. 

I wish I could go into deep and revealing analysis about the blog and why it’s been successful. But I really can’t. It happened by accident. All I can say is this: do cool stuff and write about it. 

For the curious here are my top 10 posts of this year:

1. How I Made $350 In Two Days With Three Pages And Some Payment Code

2. If you’re not failing you’re not trying

3. Battle in the Boardroom: Why Groupon Probably Paid Off Its Early Employees

4. How To Get Covered In A Major Tech Blog

5. How We Went From Being Virtually Unknown to 3k Signpus A Day in 5 Weeks

6. Why Social Proof Matters To Your Startup

7. Why We Do Startups (a personal favorite)

8. Interviewing at Y-Combinator

9. Design Your Website Like a Trash Can

10. Why Programming Is Like Dancing

It’s been a fun year guys, I hope there will be a lot more where these came from. Thanks for sticking around and reading the blog. I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you’re a regular reader.