People actually read this blog?
I integrated Google Analytics as an afterthought when setting up this blog. For the first time since I started writing, I checked out the dashboard. I expected a few page views—my own. It turns out, people actually read this stuff!
My reaction
I honestly never expected anyone to read this. No one should even be able to find my blog in the first place. After all, I have not indexed it on Google, not posted about it on any forum nor shared it. Even though I said I wished to help other developers in one of my first posts (Why I write), my true goal was to help myself when I bump into the same issue again.
Upon seeing the numbers, I was stupefied, then had a good laugh. Thank you for the readership! It feels surprisingly good to know it has helped other people.
Most read posts
The most popular posts are:
- Flutter: AndroidX migration
- Test coverage in Dart & Flutter
- Receive Share Image intents in Flutter
- Receive Share Text intents in Flutter
- Formatting dates in Flutter
So the first thing I did was browse through them again. I noticed a few typos, missing links... which I fixed.
What next?
It could be a good opportunity to learn more about publishing. Also I could make myself more available to the community. So far I've intentionally stayed anonymous and left no contact info.
Lots of questions come to mind:
- How important is tagging in a post?
- How to do SEO on Google?
- Should I index my site on other sites?
- What search queries do readers use to end up on my site?
- How important is referring to other posts in a post?
- In Ghost, you can mark an article as Featured. How does it impact page views?
- How about Google's AMP? Would it help to integrate it? How much viewership would come to the AMP page vs the regular page?
- Would people comment if I integrated a comment box?
- Would people like/tip if I integrated a like/tip component?
- Dig into the data. What do the numbers actually mean?