Well like most people, I’m glad to wind up 2016 and look forward to 2017. While in some ways, it has been a devestating, catastrophic year, in other ways, it has been incredibly satisfying as well. It’s been something of a chimera. Let’s focus on the good, and the ways things can be good.

The biggest, best thing to come out of 2016 is, of course, Grant. Despite being the absolute ultimate in all ways, he comes in third in my top 10 viewed posts this year (second if you exclude the homepage). Although, he comes in first for posts written this year. Grant has changed our lives and completed our family, and if as the youngest he is the final punctuation on our family sentence, he is an exclamation point.

At the beginning of 2016, I vowed to comment more. I said that the only way we could regain the comments section was to be purposefully and conscientiously comment ourselves on posts that matter to us and on content we enjoy. I don’t know how many comments I’ve made on other posts, but I do know how many comments my blog enjoyed this year – 217 comments this year, which is 7 more than last year. Progress!

Next year, I am resolving to be more purposeful about the Like button. I’ve noticed that on Facebook, in particular, I use the reactions and then forget if I’ve commented or liked, or whatever. Sometimes, I think I’ve reacted, but in reality, I’ve read and moved on. The frictionless ability to add a reaction has made it harder for me to hold in my own mind if I have, in fact, reacted. The extra burden of tapping out a comment puts the post in context in my own mind. Next year, I am vowing to comment more than react.

Let’s look back on how successful this patch of the internet has proven to be (at least according to the numbers):

Followers: 1,048 (not including Facebook and Twitter followers); 2,251 including those users.

I’ve had 8,154 views this year, which is an all time high for this blog! It represents a 17% increase over last year. This is the equivalent of filling up the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC) three times!

Likewise, I’ve seen an 11% increase in visitors – 4,281 people have landed on my site (mostly, I suspect, my dad).

Likes have decreased 22%, to 1,203 things that were deemed likeable this year. Sorry Grant baby; I certainly have liked you a whole heck of a lot.

Here are the posts/pages that people enjoyed the most this year:

• Home page / archives (2,023 views)
• Granite Boulder (198)
• Hello World (131)
• Broken (130)
• What I do (123)
• Pregnancy, or Practicing “this is so hard, but so worthwhile” (99)
• A leave without going (88)
• Labor (85)
• The bump (81)
• Feeding babies (77)

And here are the most popular posts that were written this year:

• Hello World (131)
• Broken (130)
• Pregnancy, or Practicing “this is so hard, but so worthwhile” (99)
• A leave without going (88)
• Labor (85)
• The bump (81)
• Feeding babies (77)
• Pregnancy update (65)
• Pregnancy update – 34 weeks (62)
• Autoimmune Progesterone Dermatitis (60)
• (honorable mention: Placenta! 58)

I’ve mentioned before that the Granite Boulder post is weirdly popular. It’s got a paint swatch of the self-same paint in it, which gets shared a lot on Pinterest. It’s not really the post itself that is popular; it’s the paint.

Popularity by country:

• USA – 6187
• UK – 509
• Germany – 252
• Canada – 240
• Brazil – 138
• Bulgaria – 132
• India – 112
• Spain – 53
• Switzerland – 46
• Ireland – 43

How people found me:

• Facebook – 2769
• WP.com Reader – 998
• Search engines – 898
  • Google Search 887
  • google image search 6
  • bing 6
  • yahoo search 5
  • aol 1
  • live.com 1
  • earthlink.net 1
  • duckduckgo.com 1
• Twitter – 524
• Pinterest – 36
• Pyjammy.com – 26
• kpresner.com – 17
• dailypost.wordpress.com – 11
• android app – 9
• HeroPress – 4

So, adios, 2016! Next year is going to be interesting and packed full of choices and I for one, can’t wait.