Top posts of 2017

2017 was a good year for me personally. This is reflected in the blog, with an array of posts chronicling my life over the past year. The posts resulted in 60k visitors to the blog, and while that may be down from last year I will consider that an improvement given DarkerView was not hacked to serve porn this year.

It is interesting to check the most popular posts. These do not necessarily represent the top read posts for the year as most folks read the latest post on the home page. Rather the top posts are the ones that gather steady traffic from search results, people looking for information on the subject and finding it in the archive of back posts…

Post Hits
A Backyard Telescope Pier 3379
Tragedy on Mauna Kea 1980
Astrophotography with the EOS-M 1536
Repairing a Wii Balance Board 1529
Getting to the Lava (Revised) 1449
Starscape Photography 1436
Consequences of a Bad LED 1411
Rewiring a Celestron NexStar Telescope 809
Viewing the ISS 747
Visiting the Summit of Mauna Kea 656
Restoring an Orange Tube Celestron C8 622
Street Photography with the Canon EOS-M3 585
Fungus on Glass 575
Canon EOS-M3 Review 541
Shooting the Canon EOS M5 518

In the list only a few of the posts are from this year. Most represent popular posts from the past several years, posts that continue to be steadily popular. This is in many ways the measure of a good blog, people find the back archive of posts valuable, that Darker View represents good content.

Darker View’s Top Posts of 2012

Looking through the site statistics is an interesting exercise. I get a chance to see what people are reading. The vast majority of readers do not write comments, the stats are the best tool for feedback I have. Perusing the stats is also an realization of one’s own vanity, a necessary motivation for all writers, not just bloggers.

Site traffic has taken a large hit with the transfer to the WordPress platform. I expected this, there would inevitably be loss of links and search engine traffic with the changeover. This has begun to recover, but very slowly. There have been 55 thousand views of the Darker View blog in 2012. Overall there were 66 thousand views of the entire site for the year, not just the WordPress material. This compares to 91 thousand visitors in 2011, about two-thirds of pre-changeover traffic. Total traffic to Darker View since inception in 2007 is now over 288 thousand visitors.

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