Is it just January? Or me?

I have noticed that I have not blogged as much in recent weeks, since Christmas really. It has not been a conscious decision; it just happened.

Many of my posts have come when it feels natural to do so, when an idea has formed in my mind or I have seen something stimulating or of note. It just feels like those moments have been in short supply recently. That is not to say there is anything bad or lacking in life right now, because I don't think there is.

From the blogs point of view it is gratifying that I am still receiving an ever increasing number of pageviews each month, well the trend is ever increasing while months do fluctuate a little.

I have tried to think about why this barren(?) patch may be in case I can learn anything from it. I am not sure that I have any concrete conclusions, but will share here the forming ideas and feelings that I have.

The first is undoubtedly the time of year. The world does seem to slow down around Christmas and with our recent weather I have been out and about less. I would also say that I had a quite but stress free and enjoyable Christmas and still feel rather relaxed and content. One manifestation is that I have been reading more (novels) in the evenings. I have also, with my wife, decorated two rooms at home that have kept us rather busy towards the end of the Christmas break and subsequent weekends.

So I guess my mind has been quieter, more relaxed, more occupied and subject to less outside stimulation. Maybe that has reduced my inclination to blog this month.

Rather more analytical I have had a look at the statistics provided by my blogging site and that has been interesting in itself.

I looked over 2012, at the number of blogs written each month and the reported activity levels.

This first graph shows both the posts I made each month (A) and the reported pageviews each months. I have divided the page views by 100 (B) to bring them to the same scale.

I think we can see a pretty strong correlations between peaks and troughs.

The next graph looked at the page views (again divided by 100) (B) and the total number of posts in the blog, divided by 10 (C) this time to come into the same scale.

And in this instance we can see a similarity between the total number of posts and the upward trend in page views.

This suggested that a simple sum of components may be instructive. What I did was add (A) and (C) and look to plot it over (B). In this instance for illustrative purposes I adjusted the sum by dividing by 1.7 to place it pretty much over (B)

This certainly suggests that the two factors, new posts and total posts are pretty stroing determinants of total page views each month. This is not too surprising as followers will pick up on activity and the search engines are impacted by the volume of searchable content.

I will keep an eye on this going forward and if it holds up then it is a good benchmark against which to assess future developments. The irony (maybe) is that the posting of this entry will contribute to its own analysis.