Looking Back on The Blog Posts of 2014

Last week was Christmas and I spent very little time online and did not collect a lot of good links. So with the  end of the year is just around the corner I thought I would take a look back at the last year according to statistics reported on my blog. Now I try not to get too caught up in the numbers largely because they tend to be unreliable. That is especially true of the numbers blogger reports. If I really had as many views as those stats suggest I should have a lot more comments. Google Analytics reports numbers that are much lower but I tend to trust them more. For my old blog I once had statistics from three different sources and they tended to agree. Since one of those was Google Analytics I’ll go with them.

One of the things I did was to look at the top viewed posts over the last 12 months. Five of the top 10 pages were written in 2013 and the most viewed page was initially posed in 2012. Though to be fair it has been updated since.

I’m not sure the ten posts listed below would make a top ten list of my favorite posts. I tend to prefer posts about interesting projects and reviews of interesting teaching tools. So the programming with blocks and Binary number teaching tools would probably rate high with me. Judging by comments here and on Facebook my post/review of the movie Top Secret Rosies was helpful and that rates high with me.

My post about which to teach first – loops or arrays had a bunch of comments and that discussion was helpful to me. Maybe others as well. Conversation is always a sign of a good post I think. My most commented on post was Leave School Now While You Still Know It All with 20 comments!

All in all though I never know what is going to get the attention it does or who (if anyone) will find value with a post. So I post what I want and hope it is useful to others.

Here’s the list for what it is worth.

• Programming with Blocks By far the most viewed page. I credit search engines with this. Plus I think it is probably the most comprehensive list of drag and drop programming tools around. If I’m missing any let me know.
•  My main page – Probably not surprising as a lot of people come directly there to read the latest posts.
• Programming Languages are horrible This one scored bog on Reddit and almost all the traffic it had was on the day it posted. Language wars are always popular link bait. This was one of those posts where I just had something I wanted to say and not something I thought had a lot of educational value.
• Your GPA Doesn’t Mean Anything Useful Another opinion piece that seemed to attract some attention.
• Programming Languages for Middle School Students This one I hoped would be useful and judging by the visits I did ok. Written just about a year ago search engines continue to bring traffic to it.
• Beware the Self-Taught Know It All Self-taught know it alls continue to show up.
• Lecture, Demo, Project This one is about  my teaching style. I was hoping for more comments on this one.
• Resources for Teaching Binary Numbers This is another collection of resources that I update as I find things that belong. It appears that a lot of teachers search for these sorts of resources.
• The More Programming languages Change the More they stay the same. I’m not sure why these language topics continue to draw attention by way of search engines. This is another one that got most of its attention the first few days BTW.
• Code Hunt I wrote this when I first really discovered Code Hunt. These days I am using it more and more to give my students exercises in programming class.