If you’re visiting this blog, most likely something about writing conference papers or Moodle, apparently.
I love numbers and stats and trends and all that fun stuff, so about once every other week I take a look at my blog stats. I like to see where people are coming from (referrals), what posts they’re reading, etc. (My favorite discovery: If you put “getting things done” in your blog title, you get a lot of hits!)
The most fun part, though, is looking at the search terms people use to get to this here blog. So, what are the most popular search terms of all time for this blog?*
- Searches for me directly (N=59). This was by far the most popular search item. I had to laugh, though, about the 2 people who found me by searching for my URL. Um, if you already know my URL….oh, nevermind.
- Moodle (N=37). People came here to complain or learn about font sizing in Moodle. Well, at least I fulfilled the first wish…
- How to write a conference paper (N=34). Um, yeah, I hope those people weren’t looking for actual advice on that one…
- This is what a computer scientist looks like (N=16), and variations thereof like “how to look like a programmer” and “how to look like a scientist”. I’m probably not the world’s authority on either, since no one believes me anyway when I tell them what I do for a living!
- Barbie-related searches round out the top 5 (N=14).
And here are some of my favorite random searches that led people here:
- why do computer scientists like mountains. Good question! I know I like mountains, but I can’t speak for all computer scientists…
- becoming a computer scientist when older. Not sure how I am the authority on this, since I went straight through to grad school….although I did take a bit of a break before becoming a professor…
- good problems to talk about. I kinda dig this one. I hope these 2 people found something to talk about! (But as we all know, writing good problems is hard.)
- innovative female design. Again, another cool search term, and I wish I had more interesting links than these—but I guess it’s a start…
However you got here, whatever led you to this blog, thanks for stopping by and reading!
(And on a totally unrelated note: I’ve been very bad about putting up any sort of blogroll, but I’m going to put one up Real Soon Now. So if you’re a regular or semi-regular or hey, even a drive-by reader and you’d like to be on the blogroll, leave a comment. Thanks!)
* I’m not exactly sure how WordPress calculates these—for instance, none of the GTD-related searches are showing up in these stats, and that’s been a fairly popular search term this week. So these may be a bit inaccurate or out of date.
This is what a computer scientist looks like 