blog posts per year: a numerical model

Many commercial blogs post year-end summaries as a way to boost hits. This blog is non-commercial so I can't be bothered with year-end summaries. But it is a good opportunity to see how my year-end flurry of posts affected my posting statistics.

First, an update of my posts per month. Here's the plot. I had a weak period for much of the year but had a nice come-back in October through year-end:

Next, I plot the total posts per year:

After I started posting in 2008, early enthusiasm caused a peak in 2010 followed by a two-year decline. This pattern is fairly common, I find.

I did a numerical fit using the following formula:

posts/year = 190.1 (year - 2007.89) exp[(2008 − year) / 2.078]

This seems to do a good job of capturing the trend. To stay on the trend line I need around 88 posts for 2013.

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