The year 2013 has been one of ups and downs, as all years tend to be. Scientifically, I've been successful in many observing runs which has had me tied down for other tasks. Hopefully, 2014 will see the publication of some of the data we've been gathering as publications are the lifeblood of all researchers. At least I got one big publication this year, which I think will be very useful on the long run.
Personally, this year has seen some good times with friends, but also some sad times as I've lost my cool more often than I'd wished and some of my best friends have left the country. Though I still chat with them and hope to see them from time to time, I still miss hanging out with them down in Chile. One the other hand, I've made some new friends. Many of these are outside the astronomy community and I feel happy hanging out with them since I get a much broader perspective of life than our relatively small world of research.
Blog-wise, I've slowed down considerably in terms of major posts. With the increased work-load, I've had more trouble making good science articles and so have fallen back to the easier book review posts. As mentioned in my Favorite Books post, I've also read less this year. So in the end, I've had 39 posts this year compared to 95 in 2012. This is still just over 3 per month, on average, so it's not bad. About 14 of these are related to astronomy, with the remaining ones been book related or miscellaneous.
According to the the Blogger stats, I see 42,800 pageviews since the blog started. Last year, this was 19,284 so that amounts to a 2013 pageview count of 23,516.
One should bear in mind that these are pageviews and not visits or unique visitors. Google Analytics has somewhat more accurate statistics and they differ substantially from the Blogger stats. According to Analytics (see figure below), I've had 9,019 pageviews in 2013 and 6,824 visits with most of them being unique.
The Blogger figure shows the most popular posts of all time and you can see that they are from 2012. Those still receive quite a bit of visitors. Three of them are book reviews (two for the Malazan series) and the other two are Astronomy-related. The most popular astronomy post is still the overview on how to measure the distance to the Sun with the transit of Venus.
The Analytics figure shows a prominent spike in the 2013 year stats at August 22, 2013. This corresponds to the article I wrote on the worker strike at ALMA observatory. I wrote this about a day or two after the strike started, but it took about a week for English-language websites to pick up the story and even then they provided very little information. Hence, for a time I was one of the few English-language websites to have mentioned the ALMA strike. The strike lasted until early September and impacted science operations at the facility. In addition to bad weather and technical problems, ALMA observations have been significantly delayed. We'll have to see how ALMA performs in 2014! There were already a lot of proposals for Cycle 2 observations...
The majority of blog viewers tend to come from Google searches with terms predominantly related to the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. A few other terms relate to Easter Island or to a few astronomy terms like ALMA. It's clear that the website has been turning more into a book review website. I'm perfectly fine with this scenario, though I still aim to post astronomy articles from time to time. In particular, I'm sure I'll write up a brief review of my time at the American Astronomical Society and Cool Stars meetings. I didn't write a review of the Latin American Regional IAU Meeting (LARIM), since I spent very little time there and didn't get much out of it except for a short break from the routine.
What will 2014 bring to my blog? Only time will tell!
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