It’s been an eventful year for CabbieBlog. In February I retired promising to write more insightful posts. About then, I invited readers to become patrons, with the incentive of gaining access to extracts from Pootling around London.

[R]egular readers might have noticed that the site’s typography has changed, it was something I’ve been wanting to do for some time. I am using Noto Serif Regular as it is a classic font style that’s perfectly suited for reading longer articles as it was designed for displaying on a website. Contrasting Noto serif font is Montserrat Bold a stylish sans face for use in headlines both displayed in 16pt with 1.6 leading, a combination with abundant white space should make it even faster to read and absorb the information, including this fascinating post. Whether reading on a laptop, tablet or phone I feel the new layout is considerably easier to read.

Here’s the annual blogging statistics for 2018. As before, with the data amassed over the last year, I’ve broken it down into bite-sized chunks with comparable figures for the previous year.



Blog visitors and page views

The numbers of visitors have increased slightly and those willing to loiter around CabbieBlog have increased quite substantially, which is been very encouraging. (Average hit rate per visitor: 2017 – 1.630; 2018 – 1.737).

2017
Visitors – 32,951
Page views – 53,718

2018
Visitors – 34,255
Page views – 59,503



CabbieBlog’s readers from abroad

The slight increase of foreign visitors could be the result of residents of poorer countries gaining access to the web, or that CabbieBlog is getting recognised around the world. The different countries whose residents have viewed CabbieBlog again include Jersey and Guernsey as if they were sovereign countries and curiously the European Union with 1,166 visits, a huge rise from the 308 visits last year, presumably the result of what they are about to lose when we Brexit. The United States leads our curious cousins with 12,851 a substantial rise from last year’s 7,727 hits.

2017 – 131

2018 – 137



Number of comments

The yardstick of a blog must be, how many of its readers decided to metaphysically put pen to paper and comment. To all of you, again a huge thank you for your encouragement or discouragement. Your comments keep me submitting posts for your perusal. Social media is increasingly reactive these days, and a much smaller proportion of people now write long-form posts providing the original material that everyone else comments upon. But at least what comments CabbieBlog receives are intelligent, relevant and insightful. I’m delighted, obviously.

2017 – 76

2018 – 124



Number of ‘likes’

It would appear that some of you have taken to the cyberverse to mark your approval of CabbieBlog in the form of a ‘like’, a huge thank you. In 2017 CabbieBlog was ‘liked’ less than for 2016, but curiously as I write this in mid-February 2019 CabbieBlog has already attracted 12 ‘likes’.

2017 – 38

2018 – 12



Followers of CabbieBlog

I seem to have found a number of followers who were hiding that had previously signed-up for regular e-mail updates. My e-mail updates only include a brief description so many of your will have had to peruse the site to read the full post. I can’t calculate how many times you have taken the trouble to follow these notifications and read my incitful posts, but thanks for following CabbieBlog.

2017 – 174

2018 – 1,252



Posts written

Having promised to produce more during retirement, due to a trapped nerve, I lost the use of my hands, clearly, this restricted my ability to write, and so I resorted to re-publishing old posts. Many are now being read for the first time and I have received many compliments. Before you all start writing ‘get well’ messages I am now on the road to recovery. So the total posts and number of words do not reflect new material. Having said that, included are new 52 trivia posts, published on Sundays.

2017– 157

2018 – 156




Most viewed and least viewed posts and pages

It has to be said that some subjects take on a life of their own while others just sit in cyberspace minding their own business. At the bottom of the table lie many posts with only one view a year, and some I suspect just sit there patiently waiting to be noticed.

2017
Highest post
London’s top secret tower – 2,295
Lowest Post
White bikes – 1
Highest page
Green cab shelters – 4,536
Lowest page
Time Out – 12

2018
Highest post
London’s top secret tower – 1,440
Lowest Post
London Trivia: Bear fight– 1
Highest page
Green cab shelters – 2,328
Lowest page
Time Out – 34




Pages written

Due to having to comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a number of new pages have had to be written.

2017 – 8

2018 – 3




Number of words written

As I mentioned before I have written substantially less this year so the word count includes new material and re-published work. It does not include Sunday’s trivia posts.

2017
Words – 71,809
Characters – 408,300

2018
Words – 71,329
Characters – 415,241




Referrers

If you ignore the search engines (with Google clocking up an impressive 25,311 hits). The next highest referrers are Twitter at 411 and just behind them is Facebook at 347.

2017
Taxileaks – 223
Londontopia – 157

2018
The Hackney Hack – 48
The Telephone Box – 46




Sitting in the back

Now retired there has been no ‘bums on seats’.

2017
Thandie Newton (actor)
Ol Parker (writer, director, producer)




In conclusion

This post is, of course, my highlight of the year. Unfortunately my readers don’t share my enthuiasm. Last year only 13 of you bothered to click on to read Statistics 2017.