Last December I took the opportunity to review my Howard County-related blogging in 2010, and I thought it would be fun to repeat that for 2011, including presenting some site statistics and links to posts I think are worthy of note.

My biggest project of 2011 was my finishing my blog series on Howard County Council redistricting and publishing it as an ebook, Dividing Howard. My main goal in doing this was to learn how to create and self-publish an ebook, and having the material mostly already written made it relatively easy to do this; the goal of creating the book also motivated me to finish the series of posts. Given the specialized topic I expected that I’d be able to count the number of copies sold on the fingers of one or two hands, and that expectation has been met: As of today I’ve sold ten copies to people other than myself. Adding to that the three copies I bought myself in order to test the buying process, my total royalties thus far are $26.54; I’ve rounded up and donated $30 to Voices for Children.

As for regular old blogging, in 2011 I did a total of 42 Howard County blog posts (not counting this one), down from 57 in the latter part of 2010 after I started doing Howard County posts. That amounted to one post related to Howard County (even peripherally) every eight or nine days, considerably off last year’s pace of one every four days. My blog traffic was also down from 2010; the average number of views was about 56 views per day, compared to 70 per day in 2010, a 20% decrease. If this trend continues my blog will be attracting only one view a day in 2029.

Here’s a (somewhat selective) list of posts (or groups of posts) I published this year, with additional commentary as appropriate:

If you have an interest in continuing to read this blog in 2012, remember that you can see new posts as soon as they’re published by using Google Reader (or another RSS reader) to subscribe to the blog’s Howard County-specific RSS feed ([https://frankhecker.com/category/howardcounty/feed/][http]). You can also follow my tumblr if you have an interest in what I’m reading and bookmarking.

In my next post I’ll look forward to 2012 and what blogging-related projects I might undertake in the new year.


HoCo Connect - 2011-12-31 21:04

Look forward to reading your blogs in the new year. You are truly the best researched blogger we have in HoCo.

hecker - 2011-12-31 23:16

Thanks. Unfortunately the amount of research needed limits the number of posts I can do.