Ten years on

The first post of this blog was published on April 22, 2008, or ten years ago. I wrote several earlier progress reports. It is time for a new one, especially because of the festive nature of ten years of blogging. Well, more or less, because the rate of new posts has been low in the past few years. More on that later. 

Let's start with a comparison with 5 years ago, when I also wrote a progress report. Then, there had been 307,000 page views according to the blogger 'stats' page, and now the counter stands at 639,478 views. I am not altogether certain that all these visits represent actual people; perhaps there were bots  as well. What is certain is that I had written 197 posts five years ago, whereas the counter now stands at 233 posts, so it is obvious I wrote more posts in the first five than the second five years.  There were 1638 comments in all, and I must say that I enjoy the interactions. The comments have quite often made me think a bit harder about what the project, and gave rise to new animals on more than one occasion. Thanks to all who read my posts with such enthusiasm!

The 'stats' section also tells me what the most-visited posts were over these ten years. Here they are, with their previous ranking from five years ago between parentheses:

1. (1) Swimming in Sand 1: the Sandworms of Dune; 5 Feb 2011; 8854 views       
2. (5) A future book on future evolution from France; 19 Nov 2011; 6239 views       
3. (4) Avatar's 'Walking with hexapods'; 11 Feb 2010; 4862 views
4. (2) Warren Fahy's "Fragment"; 8 Aug 2010; 4010 views                   
5. (-) Future evolution from France: 'Demain, les animaux...; 30 May 2015; 3327 views
6. (3) A century of thoats; 5 May 2012; 2996 views
7. (-) Create your own planet (using Celestia); 13 Aug 2011; 2717 views   
8. (-) The anatomy of giants in 'Game of Thrones'; 11 Jun 2016; 2661 views           
9. (9) Ballooning animals and Newtonian fitness; 15 Jul 2011; 2338 views   
10. (-) Second part of a review of 'Demain, les animaux...; 13 Jun 2015; 1958 views   

There are four newcomers in the top-10, but it seems that the sandworms of Dune are unbeatable. My French friends Marc Boulay and Sébastien Steyer will be pleased to learn that their work occurs no less than three times in the top-10: first as an announcement in 2011, and then as a two-part review in 2015. I hope that this signals an immense interest in books on speculative biology, because that would be good more my own project: The Book.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Some of you may recall that I had announced that I would spend less time blogging to have more time to work on The Book. The graph above shows the cumulative number of blog posts in red, from 0 in 2008 to 233 now (the present one excluded), as well as the cumulative number of spreads in blue, starting in 2011. A spread is a two-page account of a species, a chapter introduction, or of any topic worthy of devoting two pages to. The number of spreads started in 2011 because I had made the switch to digital painting and started collecting the slowly increasing number of spreads in an InDesign manuscript. I am at present working on the fiftieth spread, so within a short while the manuscript will have exactly 100 pages. Not bad, hey?

But did the reduction of blogging benefit The Book? The two vertical red lines indicate the post in 2014 in which I announced a temporary stop, and the one in 2015 in which I said that I would stop blogging except for the occasional post. Have a look at the rate of increase of the two lines: the total number of posts rose much slower from then on, while the number of spreads rose appreciably faster. The rate of new spreads since then is about nine spreads a year, which is less than the 12 I hoped to be able to manage. But please remember that this is not a job and that each spread takes presumably 20-30 hours to produce. I you ever write a book, do just that: write it; don't paint it! Mind you, The Book does not consist of images only: there are over 32,000 words at present, which is the length of a novella.

I always aimed at something like 125 pages, simply because comparable works have such a number of pages. At present I think the number will be more like 130, but we'll see. The good news is that I expect that the number of spreads per year will increase, so producing the remaining 15 spreads shouldn't take very long. Mind you, 'not very long' should be considered from the perspective that such a project may take a few decades...              
    
Because this is the tenth year of blogging, I also aim to write a few extra posts this year. I think I will finally write the long-awaited post 'What are toes for?' There will also be posts on equations: the Drake equation, the Seager equation and possibly the Nastrazzurro equation...

Six years on, and 'away until back' again

Six years of blogging led me to compare the State Of The Blog to that of one year ago. The blogger 'stats' information states that the number of page views is over 307,000. Compared to last year's 225,000 that means that some 80,000 pages were viewed, or at least flickered up on a computer screen somewhere, however briefly. The 80,000 page views of the last year make up 26% of all page views in a six year period, which suggests a big increase. But shouldn't that increase show up in the graph of page views over time?

Click to enlarge

Here it is.  Hovering the mouse over the points of the graphs pops up the number of page views for that month. Apparently. Or not. The numbers for May 2008 to April 2009 are completely missing, and so are those for May 2010 to April 2011, and for May 2012 to April 2013. That is 36 months missing over a 155 month period. The months that are depicted in the graph together add up to 307,000 page views. Does this mean that the actual number of page views was  quite a bit higher? Blogger also provides a list of page views for each individual post.

Click to enlarge

Here it is, after some transformation in Matlab. The horizontal axis shows time in days with the present as zero on the left. The total number of views according to this method is over 145,000, or less than half of the other estimate. I do not know which data are correct. Oh well; note that the peaks do not say when a given post accumulated its page views. For some posts the views were all gathered  in the past, whereas others still attract new views every day. That holds mostly for the big peaks, and the posts they concern have been indicated in the graph above. For a list of the specific posts and links, you will find that most can be found in last year's summary here.  

The graph shows that there haven't been any big peaks for some time. The reason for that can be found in which posts attract the most attention, and that is most often because they link to a film or book with a big media presence. There haven't been recent films with alien wildlife in it that was interesting to write about recently, so that is part of the explanation of the absence of recent big peaks. Some of the posts on biomechanical subjects still attract attention, but it has become more difficult to post more on that, as I already dealt with the most obvious subjects.

After 197 posts, this one included, I have started wondering whether it is time to stop blogging. As I wrote before I have an impression that the blog is not as  fresh as it used to be, but perhaps that this just the result of having had less time than ever to work on Furaha or on the blog. Perhaps the blog and I need to go on vacation, but probably not together; I think it is time for another sabbatical, similar to the one two years ago.

I do not know when the blog will return, but some events will make me come back. One of these is that I have been trying for several months to get a session of talks on speculative biology on the programme of the next World Science Fiction Convention. That will be 'Loncon3', next August in London (I have only been to a WorldCon once before but can recommend it to all who like science fiction; they are not often held in Europe, so perhaps you should consider going if you are in Europe; there will be some 8000 participants). My efforts seem to be paying off, so if all goes well there will be talks, not just concerning Furaha, but about other Speculative Biology projects as well. I am tempted to disclose who else is likely to be there, but as the programme is not final it is better to be prudent and stay quiet. I expect the programme to become final and public in June, and will certainly come back to write about it here.

But now it's off towards the sunset again....