A look at trends in the site analytics after about a year since I started blogging. I started this blog in July 2025, but only really got started with posting on it in August, so we can say it's been approximately a year since I started. So I thought I'd look to see if there's any conclusions that can be drawn from my blog stats. The answer is... not really? Graph As you can see from the graph... there is no rhyme or reason to the blog. Sometimes there are spikes of hits. Sometimes there are zero. I'm sure if I had the actual numbers I could run some statistics to see what the average, min/max, trend line, etc. but I don't and that's probably for the best. Totals Unique reads: 7,459 Unique visitors: ~4,601 Does this mean most visitors read more than one page? Hopefully? Maybe? Most Popular Posts by Hits Bearblog Toast Button CSS (▵151) ↪ 479 FFXIV + ReShade on Linux (▵9) ↪ 420 Home ↪ 417 Bearblog Customization (▵1) ↪ 381 Browse (▵1) ↪ 298 Homepage Dashboard Customization (▵7) ↪ 257 Bearblog Theme CSS v4 (▵7) ↪ 255 About (▵2) ↪ 226 Switching to Octopi Launcher on Android (▵3) ↪ 218 Bearblog How To: Custom /blog/ Page (▵8) ↪ 203 Organizing Media Files with Radarr & Sonarr (▵1) ↪ 170 Tags (▵3) ↪ 150 Diagnosing & resolving ASUS BIOS issues & broken NVIDIA graphics card power management on an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 running CachyOS (▵3) ↪ 139 Linux Attempt No.3: CachyOS on an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (▵6) ↪ 92 Bearblog How To: The Anarchaeopteryx Theme (▵4) ↪ 90 Daily Use Software for CachyOS (▵3) ↪ 87 Headphone Review: Sony WI-C100 Wireless In-Ear Neckband Earbuds (▵1) ↪ 85 Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) (▵1) ↪ 85 Puzzmo & Hard Paywalls (▵1) ↪ 82 Bearblog CSS: Moving tags to the top of the post (▵5) ↪ 74 Bearblog seems to get very good SEO on all the search engines, so some of my posts have more hits than the Home or Browse pages! I don't know why the toast button post still gets so many hits when it's actually not that great, plenty of other bearblog users have made much better ones. The FFXIV Reshade post seems to get hits because seemingly nobody else has written an easily accessible tutorial on how to do this. The vast majority of hits on that page are from DuckDuckGo, Google, or Reddit. The Bearblog Theme CSS v4 post gets an incredibly strange number of hits even though my theme is up to version 17. It doesn't even have any particularly interesting code snippets in it! But it seems to have captured the SEO from all the other posts and keeps appearing in search engines. It also seems to get pulled up by chatgpt and perplexity.ai. If you're going to re-use my code for your own blog you might as well use the actually current version, but whatever I guess... The rest of the most popular posts are tutorial or informational style content with clear SEO-friendly post titles (although I do that because I like clear and descriptive titles myself). Also, as you can see, aside from the toast button post most of these highly-hit pages don't get many upvotes. The ratio of upvote to post is pretty abysmal. However I have noticed that posts that are mostly read by people who know me or other bearbloggers tend to get a better hit to upvote ratio. What that indicates to me is that on bearblog there is more of a culture of toasting posts that you have read and liked similar to Kudosing on AO3, but random strangers don't know and don't care about that button and are only interested in the site in a transactional way. Referrers https://bearblog.dev/ ↪ 1,555 https://www.google.com/ ↪ 1,223 https://duckduckgo.com/ ↪ 469 https://kagi.com/ ↪ 211 https://search.brave.com/ ↪ 130 https://www.reddit.com/ ↪ 66 https://www.bing.com/ ↪ 64 https://westkarana.xyz/ ↪ 56 https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/ ↪ 44 https://www.ecosia.org/ ↪ 41 So the majority of links that come with a referrer tag come from bearblog.dev and therefore probably the Discover feed. The posts that are most popular with that crowd are, not surprisingly, mostly posts about bearblog customization, however some of my more personal/opinion posts have attracted attention that way which is nice to see. Bearbloggers don't only care about Linux and CSS. Just mostly. Google, Duckduckgo, Kagi, Brave search, Bing, and Ecosia are all search engines, obviously, and based on the hit patterns I suspect there is literally one person each using Ecosia and Bing. Maybe a couple people using Brave and Kagi. Reddit is as high on that list as it is solely because of the FFXIV + ReShade on Linux post. https://westkarana.xyz/ is the personal project of @Tipa@gamepad.club and only ever gets one clickthrough, if any, so I have to assume that's Tipa herself. https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/ has linked to my bearblog customization pages a couple of times and that provides occasional hits. User Agent Strings Devices Windows 2,272 Android 1,645 Mac OS 1,605 iOS 952 Linux 919 ChromeOS 67 Yes, despite all the Linux content, Windows-using readers still vastly outnumber them. Browsers Chrome 3,413 Firefox 2,077 Safari 1,481 ChromiumEdge 275 ChromeiOS 70 Opera 43 AndroidBrowser 3 Chrome is still winning over Firefox as well, although I wonder if that's including Chromium variants or not. Too bad for Chrome users, I never test this site on Chrome because I only use it in specific situations and I ain't starting now. Countries United States 2,265 Canada 1,497 United Kingdom 575 Germany 244 Bulgaria 196 Australia 170 China 162 India 159 Brazil 140 Spain 136 Not surprising that my English-language Canada-based blog largely gets hits from the USA, Canada, and the UK. I know I have friends in Germany and Australia and Spain. The other countries are more of a surprise, however I suppose one or two avid readers or search engine hits would be enough to achieve those numbers. I can't filter to see which posts are getting hit by which country, so hard to say. Conclusions Most personal posts seem to get most of their hits the day and day after posting, the tutorial posts have more longevity. As you can tell, the digest posts that I put up every week get next to no hits, but because of that I can get a better idea of my "true" readership. Which is somewhere between 5 and 20. This naturally excludes people who only read in their feed readers, so honestly that's more than I would have expected. I think as long as there was more than one reader I would still be writing. That's pretty much my criteria for success here. I believe last year people with larger blogs found that Blaugust didn't meaningfully increase their readership, so as an advertising method it isn't that effective, we'll see at the end of the month if there's any interesting changes. I've made $0 from this and spend about $8 CAD on the monthly subscription fee, which I feel so far has been worth it. I don't have a group chat or discord server to chat with friends in, just a mastodon account and a blog. So thanks again for reading. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay A Year of Bearblog Analytics was last edited: 2 days, 12 hours ago