Publishing 1 (tech) blog post per day: the results

I've always kept a blog, at least as far back as I can remember. First a Skyblog (of course), then a homemade blog, a Wordpress, a Medium and finally... this self-hosted blog powered by Ghost.

Of course I like writing for myself, but I especially like writing for others. For some it's therapy, but what interests me most when I write an article is sharing my experience, sharing my knowledge about my job, but above all about my passion.

And what luck to be able to do a job I'm passionate about, in comfortable conditions on top of that!

But recently, as some of you know, I decided to do even more to help newcomers in this field that's both exciting and very complex, which can scare off more than a few.

So I decided to take it up a notch, and turn the blog where I wrote a few articles a month (about one a week) into a blog with daily content!

I won't hide from you that the shift wasn't easy to make, and I thought I'd run out of topics as early as the second week, but that's not the point here because today I'm celebrating the first month of existence of this new format! (5 articles a week, resting on weekends)

If you're interested, I wrote an article about my methods for keeping up this pace, available right here!

So I propose to take stock of the blog's evolution over the last 3 months, particularly regarding the number of page views!

The tortoise: March 14, 2020 - April 13, 2020

Result: 128 page views

This period serves as my reference because at the time I wasn't publishing much and despite a few articles that did well, like "The 5 biggest failures that taught me to be a better entrepreneur", the results were rather average with an average of 4.2 page views per day.

The hare: April 14, 2020 - May 13, 2020

Result: 308 page views

It was during these 30 days that I started to seriously work on my blog, write more articles and share them regularly on social media.

In April I wrote about various topics, sometimes very far from web development, which is why my two flagship articles from this period are my counterfactual essay titled "What if the tomato had never existed" as well as my first daily article "The biggest problem with Tailwind CSS...", which allowed me to more than double my number of page views in 1 month!

The visibility this first daily article (in what would become a long series) received is surely one of the factors that helped me stick with creating this daily content!

The cheetah: May 14, 2020 - June 13, 2020

Result: 1139 page views

This is the result of many hours of work, and even though it's not an incredible number for a blog (I'm not Korben yet!), it's still an increase of almost 900% compared to my reference period.

While it's true that a page view isn't necessarily an article read, by looking more closely at the statistics, I was able to see that the average time spent on pages was 2 minutes 34 seconds! Much more than what I expected when starting this blog!

I wanted to leave you with a little graph representing the evolution of the number of page views during this period (the peaks represent shares in junior developer groups)

And of course with the most popular article of the last 30 days (and of my blog in general): "John Doe, the personal website template for web developers".