2013 in Review

As the year comes to a close, I have taken some time to review ... my blog. I know, kind of self-serving, but still something for me to consider.

As always, my aim has been one post a day (you know, as a minimum). I had 370. I met that goal.

This year I wrote a few series. I tried to maintain a worship theme on Sunday posts. In March there was a series based on Jonah because, after all, I was reading Jonah. In August I did a series on Essential Christianity discussing just what is Christianity and the necessary components without which Christianity could not survive. In September I did a four-part entry on whether or not one can lose his or her salvation. With the singular exception of the second entry on Jonah, none of these managed to grab much attention.

The discussions have been ... quieter. My most commented post was from 9/8 on the Two Wills of God with at total of 55 comments. The notion that God would will everything that happens was controversial. Second was Truth by Vote with 38 comments. The post was about how people often determine what is true by the numbers of people that believe it. Unfortunately, the example was the question of the existence of same-sex marriage. Thus, the concept of whether or not truth is determined by vote was lost in the disagreement over the morality of same-sex marriage. In A Baby Question I asked if the popular "we should wait to have kids until we can afford it" approach was biblical or wise. This one drew some discussion as you can imagine, topping out at 37 comments. To be fair, there was more than a couple of comments in that section because I mentioned I was considering ending my seven-year blogging stint and several people wanted to discuss that. As it turns out, 165 of my 370 posts had no comments. I don't know what that means, but it doesn't feel good.

Viewership has dwindled over the year. The entry of May 8, Where do you come up with this?, led the pack with 190 views. I discussed how I come up with the positions I come up with. Number 2 was Easy Writing for Christians where I suggested that the easiest way to get people to like what you write is to write what they like ... and that's not a good plan. A total of 184 people looked at that. Of the 370 posts of 2013, only 12 had more than 100 views. The average was 42. And I found it ... unpredictable. I mean, who would have thought that a post on giving thanks to the God of heaven would have received the same number of views as a post titled Is it a sin to be gay? I would have naturally thought that the latter would have had far more traffic than the former. Who knew that people were just as interested in giving God glory as they were in asking the question about sin and homosexuality? (See how statistics can lie?)

The reality is that my readership has been dropping since it hits its highest levels in May of this year. The week ending May 2, 2013, showed 685 visits to my blog and -- get this -- 1,527 page views. Imagine that! Of course, by mid-November it was bottoming out with 363 visits and 465 page views. This, along with other factors, makes statistics fairly useless, except that I planned to write 365 posts in the year and I met that goal. But when last year's highest views was at 524 and this year's was only 190, one does start to wonder.

So, what is my goal? What am I doing here? In May I was looking through my past writings and discovered that I was repeating -- often nearly word for word -- stuff I have written before. Maybe, just maybe, I've run out of things to say. On the other hand, no one notices that I'm repeating myself because no one remembers that I wrote it before (if they even read it before). So maybe it's not an issue. Primarily I'm writing to hear myself write, so to speak. No, not accurate. But there are things I'm thinking about and wish to express. Writing them out helps me think them through. (You have no idea how much stuff I've written, reviewed, and deleted because it was poorly thought out or just plain wrong.) I write, then, in the hopes of sharing helpful thoughts with my readers, but I also write to clear the cobwebs from my own mind. As readership dwindles (it has rebounded somewhat in December), then, perhaps the numbers don't really matter. Perhaps sharing what I'm thinking in order to help myself think better is enough. It would be nice if some of you were blessed, encouraged, even corrected in the process, but I'm not well known for being an optimist. So, for the moment, I'll keep clearing the baffles, so to speak, and offer whatever cogent theology, clear thinking, and Christian encouragement I can as we head into 2014.