December is winding down, and I’m looking through the various streams of data to see what I can learn from my online activities this year. I have WordPress configured to keep track of how many posts I’m writing per month and by which category. The yearly post count average looks like it’s holding steady over the last ten years, shallowing out the trend line that skewed from a flurry of activity in 2005:

The category data gets a little more complicated to parse, because my syndication system pulls in posts from the Scout blog and that data shows up in the category count. I used a GREP script to filter that out and updated the spreadsheet I used from last year, keeping 2020’s data and adding the new numbers to see what’s gotten the most attention. I pulled two categories from the count—Shortlinks (this category is just a flag for sidebar posts) and Photo (a flag for any post with an embedded Flickr photo) because they skew the data. Orange is 2020, red is 2021:

The Finn, Family, House, Politics (ugh) and Scout categories all bumped up a lot this year, which is what I’d expect. And clearly there are some categories that don’t get any love—maybe I retire and reclassify some of those in 2022?

My site stats tell me that May 2 was the busiest day of the year, and that posts I wrote about iPhone calendar battery drain and my Subaru GL wagon are by far the most heavily traveled pages on the site. That tracks; This site is more for me than it is for you, but I’m happy all three of you have read this far.