Two days ago I received a message from WordPress informing me that: ‘Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com! You registered on WordPress.com 12 years ago. Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging.’ The missive reminded me that CabbieBlog has been publishing a minimum of two posts a week since its inception, and at the time of writing (January 2021) had over 1,629 posts published online and, remarkably 1,170 scheduled posts.
Starting with the defunct platform ‘Blog’, then moving to Google’s Blogger, after a year I changed my allegiance to WordPress. Although my remaining with WordPress is waning as they are turning over to Gutenberg Block Editor which obviates the need for coding, favouring a new ‘simpler’ system.
All this means that CabbieBlog in its various incarnations has been freely available for nearly 13 years.
Never content with CabbieBlog’s appearance, I’ve again changed the typeface to 13.5pt Lato, with a line-height of 1.6, described by its designer as “[the typeface has] a feeling of warmth, while the strong structure provides stability and seriousness”, which seems, in my mind, to describe a London cabbie. Lato is a sans-serif typeface designed in 2010 for a Polish bank by Łukasz Dziedzic. When it came to paying for it, the bank said it was too expensive and Dziedzic was left with a type family that he didn’t know if it was marketable. So he released it in 2015 under a SIL Open Font License. The name ‘Lato’ is Polish for summer, the name perfectly fits this warm-feeling sans-serif. As of August 2018, Lato is used on more than 9.6 million websites, including Starbucks and Miss Vogue, it is the third most served font on Google Fonts, with over one billion views per day. CabbieBlog’s headings are now displayed in Raleway Extra Bold, which perfectly complements the text.
The site has also added extra content in the sidebar for those who quaintly still read CabbieBlog on a laptop. These include ‘In my opinion’ – weekly London quotes; ‘Frequent fares’ – CabbieBlog’s most popular posts; ‘Regular passengers’ – those of you who have checked out CabbieBlog the most; and ‘Blogs worth hailing’ – a basic blogroll. Also, I am uploading a weekly cabbie image to Flickr.
In addition, a donation ‘like’ button from Ko-fi should anyone feel the need to drop CabbieBlog and a couple of quid.
So with more information than is reasonably necessary, here are the annual blogging statistics for 2020. 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
Difficult to gauge, for instance, CabbieBlog has 172 followers on Bloglovin’ so none of their views will be recorded, but according to my basic counter the numbers of visitors has increased, but those willing to loiter around have decreased. CabbieBlog has attracted a number of regular readers, which, I suspect have found their way from BeetleyPete, which is very encouraging. (Average hit rate per visitor: 2019 – 1.8117; 2020 – 1.6118).
2019
Visitors – 22,994
Page views – 41,659
2020
Visitors – 28,403
Page views – 45,781
CabbieBlog’s readers from abroad
The different countries whose residents have viewed CabbieBlog again include Jersey (at 24) and Guernsey (at 25), as if they were sovereign countries in their own right and curiously the European Union with 11, a huge drop from the 497 visits last year, presumably the result of us being released from their clutches. The United States leads our curious cousins with 5,544 a rise since last year’s 4,773 hits.
2019 – 117 individual countries
2020 – 137 individual countries
Number of comments
The yardstick of a blog must be how many of its readers decided to metaphysically put pen to paper and comment, and this year, despite, or because of COVID-19, has seen exponential growth. I suspect my decision to become hosted by WordPress has also brought more contributors. To all of you, again a huge thank you for your encouragement or discouragement. Your comments keep me submitting regular 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 the comments CabbieBlog receives are intelligent, relevant and insightful. I’m delighted, obviously.
2019 – 94
2020 – 169
Number of ‘Likes’
When you have a super, intelligent and engaging blog which is blessed with visitors that clearly repeatedly like to Like, you are in a favourable position. The Likes are on a huge upward trend, again a huge thank you for touching the Like button at the foot of every post.
2019 – 79
2020 – 359
Followers of CabbieBlog
My e-mail updates only include a brief description so many of you 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 inciteful posts, but thanks for following CabbieBlog.
2019 – 1,248
2020 – 1,315
Posts written
Most of this year’s output has been new material, although Wednesday’s Weekly Whinge first appeared on the Journal page. In addition to the total posts, 52 London in Quotations (which, of course, are not original) has been published amounting to more than 2,000 words.
2019– 156
2020 – 209
Most viewed and least viewed posts and pages
It has to be said that some subjects take on a life of their own, Goswell Street Road, for instance, was picked up by Reddit in early December, while others just sit in cyberspace minding their own business. At the bottom lie many posts with only a few views a year, and some I suspect just sit there patiently waiting to be noticed.
2019
Highest post
London myths debunked – 2,295
Lowest Post
Queen of Hell – 1
Highest page
The Knowledge – 4,536
Lowest page
Time Out – 12
2020
Highest post
London myths debunked – 2,282
Lowest Post
Site Unseen: Gwynne House– 15
Highest page
13 Survivors – 1,491
Lowest page
Privacy Policy – 15
Pages written
This year no new pages have appeared on CabbieBlog.
2019 – 0
2020 – 0
Number of words written
My average output of about 1,500 words written each week has been increased as a result of finishing my book, giving me more time for the blog.
2019
Words – 80,757
Characters – 468,385
2020
Words – 84,748
Characters – 489,994
Referrers
If you ignore the search engines, with Google clocking up an impressive 20,200 hits, social media referrers are Twitter at 513 and, surprisingly, as I havn’t an account, Facebook at 740.
2019
Spitalfields Life – 46
The Hackney Hack – 12
2020
Diamond Geezer – 162
The Telephone Box – 12
In conclusion
This post is, of course, my highlight of the year. Unfortunately my readers don’t share my enthuiasm. Last year only 46 of you bothered to click on Statistics 2019, with not one person viewing this incisive post from June to August.
CabbieBlog 