I started this blog one year ago today, with a post on site-selective glycosylation. According to Google Analytics, there have been 24,035 views since then.
What have the top posts been?
The only of these that really surprises me is #5: the 13C NMR post made a lot of organic chemists really angry, the Talent review was reposted on Marginal Revolution, and Delian Asparouhov (CEO of Varda) retweeted my post about Varda’s crystallization ideas. And everyone loves to share a ranking of the year’s papers, especially when their own work is highlighted.
The least-viewed posts?
Twitter downranked the Substack post pretty heavily, so it’s not surprising that nobody saw it. The Lennard–Jones posts are more unexpected. Whenever I write about anything computational or coding-related, it seems to attract much less engagement, which is perhaps a reflection of the fact that most of my followers are experimental chemists who don’t really care about obfuscated C code.
A year in, writing blog posts has gotten much easier. The following advice from Alexey Guzey didn’t seem true when I started, but it does seem true now:
Writing not only helps you to understand what’s going on and to crystallize your thoughts, it actually makes you think of new ideas and come up with solutions to your problems.
I’ve fallen into a 1x/week update schedule, which seems to work pretty well: enough to keep the routine up, but not so much that it’s a serious distraction from my actual job. I hope to maintain this schedule for the foreseeable future, and recommend it to other bivocational bloggers.
Anyhow, thanks for reading!
(Also, today in off-blog content: I appeared on my first podcast, Forbidden Conversations, hosted by Harry Wetherall. We talk about why people don’t have kids earlier, how I reconcile being a Christian with being a scientist, the concept of “cope,” and more: you can check it out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.)