6 Months in and bowing out

I have been thinking about the project lately and I have decided that this is going to be my last blog post that has been “forced” by the 365 project.

I started doing the project under very different circumstances and with goals in mind that I feel I have reached. Let me elaborate.

Goals

One of the main goals I had for this project was to systematise how I write blog posts, I wanted to get better at generating ideas, collecting information and writing.

I feel I have accomplished this. My methods for doing all of those things have matured and I have developed what I believe to be sustainable habits for ongoing writing.

Not that sustainable

The one thing that hasn’t been sustainable is the output. I knew going into the project that the equivalent of one post a day was going to be tough going, but at the time of planning this project I thought it would be doable.

Life of course has other plans. A change in jobs and some other projects starting/stopping that I couldn’t have planned for has meant that the time I can dedicate to writing isn’t as long as I thought it was going to be.

Proud of some of the output

Whilst I am very happy with the processes put in place, the output I have been giving people hasn’t been completely up to snuff. I worried this would be the case when I took on the project.

When speaking to a friend about it he initially said (and I am paraphrasing here) “Why not make the task to write 10 really great blog posts this year”.

That would have have been a noble goal, but I don’t think it would have achieved what I wanted, which was to develop processes to help me write, not just put a lot of effort into a handful of one off posts.

In retrospect I should have went somewhere in the middle. 100 posts could have been the sweet spot between enough to need systems and allowing enough time for quality.

I am still going to write

I still love writing, and indeed for the next while you might not even notice a change in the frequency of my output because I have a lot of ideas I still want to write about and a lot of half complete posts in the pipeline.

If you would like me to write for your website or publication please let me know.

Some stats to finish everything off

Since I am calling time on this project I figure I should share some of the stats I have gathered during this time.

Posts Written

This is the 125th post written during the project. I was 68 posts behind schedule.

Being behind never worried me, like I say I have plenty of ideas and things in draft.

I have written around 50,000 words in this time. Which is quite a nice feeling.

Traffic

The majority of my posts were written on my personal website so this is where I was checking for traffic. I have pulled these stats from Google Analytics.

Interestingly traffic has decreased on my site between the first six months of 2015 compared to the first six months of 2014.

Users on the site has decreased by 13.45% (83,525 this year vs 96,506 last year).

The bounce rate as increased as well, by 2.72% (it has been 90.65% so far this year vs 88.25% last year).

Both could be symptoms of lower quality content being put out, something I am not happy with.

Favourite Posts and Highlights

There are three posts that come to mind (3 out of 125 is pretty depressing) when I think of highlights.

• Set Intersection in Ruby was picked up by Ruby Weekly, which is huge!
• HTTP Status codes for SEO I learned a load writing this article and it has been getting positive feedback.