Ten Years Of Blogging

Incredibly, this month marks the 10th anniversary of my blog, as I registered with WordPress and started rambling away here at the start of February in 2016, talking about my conditions aniridia and nystagmus. The old journal posts listed before then were added and backdated retrospectively during the Covid lockdowns as something to do, although in that regard I’m impressed that I’ve been able to fill a blog with content spanning over 25 years, and that people have been so interested in reading about my past as well as the present.

I’ve also just started my 10th year of living in London, so while my anniversary of the big move isn’t technically until next Christmas, and I will probably say more about that particular milestone when the time comes, it’s practically a double celebration.

And on top of all that, thanks to some fortuitous timing, I’ve managed to ensure that this particular post is my 500th to be published here. Sure, there have been more than that in total, as a few posts have been merged or deleted over time, and I’m not counting the index pages. But in terms of currently published posts on my homepage, there are now 500 exactly.

Contents

• Reflections
  • Opportunities & Connections
  • Thank You!
• Statistics
  • Views
  • Posts
  • Sharing
  • Referrers
  • Locations
  • Devices

Reflections

Opportunities & Connections

This blog has only ever been a little hobby alongside my main career, hence I’ve never shouted from the rooftops about it much on social media beyond plugging my posts and sharing some of my photos. I’ve never dreamed of being a big influencer, nor do I feel I have the knowledge, personality or confidence to do it even if I wanted to. So I’ve never gone viral. And it also explains why I’ve never attracted any trolls, which is a bonus.

Yet despite not doing a lot to draw attention to myself, and perhaps in some ways because of my polite and unassuming modesty, writing this blog has drawn me into all sorts of opportunities and experiences, including collaborations with various people for media appearances, public speaking, research studies, guest posts and paid freelance work. I’ve even done a charity abseil that TV star Richard Osman donated to, experienced a helicopter ride and had a student documentary made about me.

And most of all I’ve made some great new friendships in the outside world as a direct result of connections I’ve made through my blogging, which in turn have led to a full-time job and a relationship over the years, as well as experiences like those mentioned above and many more.

I’m very pleased that I’ve helped to raise awareness around my eye conditions, sight loss, assistive technology, audio described theatre and other disability issues along the way, for which I’ve received great feedback from lots of people. It’s been especially touching to receive messages from parents who have found my experiences to be of comfort to them, having been worried and unsure if it’s possible for their visually impaired offspring to lead a good life. I’ve even spoken to children directly about it as well. And on top of all that, I’ve also loved writing about my explorations of London and beyond, and the various forms of entertainment I enjoy.

I’m also glad that I’ve demonstrated my existing skills and developed new ones, and I haven’t pretended to be anyone I’m not, thereby earning myself a reputation for someone who is friendly, fun, trustworthy and good at what I do.

Thank You!

So I’m very proud of all that, and extremely grateful to everyone who’s played any part in my blogging journey and life in London whatsoever. I’ve done far more than I ever expected when I started, in terms of the number of posts or the opportunities resulting from them. And there’s still more to come. Who knows what the future holds?

So if you’ve been here for any part of this journey, even if it’s just quietly reading my posts, then that means a lot to me. Knowing that people are still enjoying my content, from the feedback I receive and the view counts I monitor, encourages me to keep going. Thank you so much! 🙂

Statistics

As an appendix to pad the post out, here’s some of the nerdy stuff for anyone who’s interested.

My statistics won’t be remotely impressive when compared to the big players in the blogosphere, I’m well aware of that. But for a quiet, casual writer like myself, I’m still surprised and really happy with them, and it is interesting to root around in my WordPress dashboard. So I figured it might be interesting to delve into the data, as a little glimpse behind the scenes.

Views

At the time of writing, I’ve had 291,163 views from 182,959 visitors in the past 10 years to date, which is mind-blowing to me. And naturally the number of views has increased over time:

• 2016 = 1,738
• 2017 = 9,408
• 2018 = 19,656
• 2019 = 24,069
• 2020 = 39,266
• 2021 = 36,674
• 2022 = 27,367
• 2023 = 34,291
• 2024 = 42,650
• 2025 = 50,941

Naturally there was a spike during the 2 years that Covid locked people in their homes, and I’m glad I was able to provide a good distraction for readers during that period. But once that had ended, 2022 was still higher than 2019, and the numbers have steadily continued to grow since then. It’s lovely that I passed the 50,000 milestone in my 10th year!

Since July 2024 my views have always been at least 3,200 per month. Mostly they’ve hovered between that and 4,000, but in 4 months they topped 4,000, in a couple of months they were over 5,000, and 1 month was over 7,000.

My best ever month was November 2020, with over 7,900 views. That was mainly driven by over 4,000 views for my post about Royal Mail scam emails, with a spike of 1,229 views for that post on the 12th of the month, driven by search engine traffic. I don’t know what triggered such a frenzy of queries on that day! There were a further 553 views for an iCloud scam during the month as well, and a few other scam posts made the top 10. My homepage was in 2nd place that month with 593 views.

I haven’t written about scam emails for a long time, as luckily I don’t get many, and I didn’t want those posts to start feeling repetitive either. But it shows how prevalent they still are when my old scam email posts keep getting a lot of hits. So I should probably try and get in the habit of doing them again perhaps, they are a good magnet for traffic to the site. WordPress regularly blocks a lot of scam messages that come through my contact form as well, so I could easily write about some of those as well as occasional emails.

The other month that had over 7,000 views was much more recent, in October 2025, where I got over 7,400 hits. No particular post dominated in the month as a whole, the post views were quite evenly spread. However, there was a big spike on October 29, with 1,935 hits between 4am and 5am, seemingly all from the USA via Google searches, downloading images of Exeter Cathedral, its Christmas Market and the local shopping centre that were featured in my Christmas In Devon post 2 years earlier. The post itself doesn’t feature in the chart, but the images take up the top 16 positions on that date, with the top 7 getting between 133 and 316 views each. So I can only assume there was a flurry of Google image searches from America during that hour, but I’ve no idea what prompted it. It’s a mystery!

Posts

The most popular posts across the past 10 years are:

1. Scam Email – Apple iCloud (11,661)
2. Scam Email – IMF Compensation (11,336)
3. Scam Emails – Royal Mail Delivery (11,102)
4. The Last Leg – My Studio Audience Experience (6,443)
5. Mock The Week – My Studio Audience Experience (5,845)
6. Red Dwarf – Series 1-8 – Blu-ray Box Set Review (5,746)
7. Living With Nystagmus (5,294)
8. Audio Description & DVD Navigation (4,872)
9. The Young Ones – 40th Anniversary Blu-ray Review (4,830)
10. Scam Emails – Natwest & Metro Bank (4,247)

This further emphasises how popular the scam awareness posts are. But I’m very glad a couple of my oldest disability posts from 2016 have done so well, along with a few of my entertainment posts. The list does reflect the mixture of material I churn out here quite nicely.

But of course, tastes change over time, and if we narrow down the search to just the past 3 years, the list looks like this:

1. Blackadder – 40th Anniversary Blu-ray Review (2,909 views)
2. The Young Ones – 40th Anniversary Blu-ray Review (2,906 views)
3. TMI Tag (2,750 views)
4. Live Aid Review (2,333 views)
5. Doctor Who Review – Season 1 (2,254 views)
6. London 2012 Revisited – Olympics Opening Ceremony (2,206 views)
7. Scam Email – Apple iCloud (2,018 views)
8. London 2012 Revisited – Olympics Closing Ceremony (1,836 views)
9. Queen Album Review – Queen I Collector’s Edition (1,760 views)
10. Homepage (1,714 views)

I’ve certainly been doing more entertainment reviews in recent years, because I enjoy putting them together, and the fact that they’re popular makes it all the more worthwhile, hence I keep doing them. It’s also interesting to see the TMI Tag in there, as it’s one of my oldest posts from 2016. For some reason it spiked in June 2025 with 910 views, and 312 in the preceding month, before dropping off again. So I don’t know why it suddenly gained such traction, but it’s nice that it did!

The list looks fairly similar for the past 12 months as well.

1. TMI Tag (2,072)
2. Blackadder – 40th Anniversary Blu-ray Review (1,727)
3. Homepage (1,714)
4. Live Aid Review (1,409)
5. The Young Ones – 40th Anniversary Blu-ray Review (1,193)
6. Queen Album Review – Queen I Collector’s Edition (905)
7. Live 8 Review (786)
8. Doctor Who Review – Season 1 (668)
9. The Beatles – Super Deluxe Box Sets (645)
10. Red Dwarf – Series 1-8 – Blu-ray Box Set Review (614)

Sharing

As for where things have been shared:

1. Print = 58.6K
2. Reddit = 33.2K
3. Telegram = 1.2K
4. WhatsApp = 1.3K
5. Bluesky = 1K
6. Threads = 983
7. Nextdoor = 799
8. Email = 101

Considering I’ve never used Reddit in my life, I’m impressed that my content has been shared so widely there, thank you Redditors! I do know there’s a blind person from England on there called Lau, who joined 2 years ago using the handle “well-eye-never”, but it’s not me, and I have no idea who they are. But they’re not doing me any harm as far as I’m aware, as they’re not pretending to be me or disparaging me to my knowledge.

It’s good to see Bluesky and Threads picking up quite a bit as well now, considering they’re relatively new platforms. Like many people I’ve stopped posting on X, so I did rejig the social share buttons below my posts recently, to remove that site and to add in WhatsApp, Bluesky and Threads, so that probably explains the uptick in their activity.

Referrers

These are the sources that referred people here the most:

1. Search Engines (185,793) – Google is responsible for 180,912 of these hits, followed by Bing with 2,570 and DuckDuckGo with 1,262.
2. Google App on Android (6,870)
3. Facebook (2,880)
4. Twitter / X (2,041)
5. WordPress Reader (1,828)
6. Youtube (1,324)
7. Reddit (776)
8. Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) (615)
9. Euan’s Guide (444) – I was on their list of 12 disabled bloggers to check out, though that page seems to have gone now, sadly. But thank you Euan’s Guide!
10. Google Lens (264)

Locations

Looking at where my visitors are from, there’s no surprises as to the top two countries. I like the fact that Australia is third as well though, I hadn’t expected that.

1. United Kingdom (141,383)
2. United States (64,518)
3. Australia (8,803)
4. Canada (8,729)
5. Ireland (5,964)
6. India (4,239)
7. Nigeria (4,189)
8. Germany (3,874)
9. France (2,960)
10. Netherlands (2,896)

Going a bit deeper, it gets a bit more interesting if you look at the regions where I’m getting the most views from:

1. England, UK (24,210)
2. California, UK (4,698)
3. British Columbia, Canada (1,964)
4. Scotland, UK (1,558)
5. Wales, UK (1,384)
6. New South Wales, Australia (1,271)
7. New York, USA (1,230)
8. New Jersey, USA (1,172)
9. Texas, USA (987)
10. Ontario, Canada (869)

And then it gets quite random when you pick out the top 10 cities, beyond the obvious top choice:

1. London, UK (7,050)
2. Rancho Santa Margarita, California, USA (1,947)
3. Pineview, northwest of New York City (1,741)
4. Leeds, UK (1,297)
5. Manchester, UK (1,235)
6. Uxbridge, UK (920)
7. Sydney, Australia (908)
8. Birmingham, UK (765)
9. North Bergen, New Jersey, USA (751)
10. New York City, New York, USA (678)

It is of course possible that some people are using VPNs or other means to disguise their location. But assuming the lists are broadly accurate, it’s interesting to see what a mixture they are!

Devices

And finally, in terms of the devices people are using:

• 56% are on mobile, 38% on desktop and 6% on tablets.
• The top 3 browsers being used are Chrome (49.8K), Safari (34.1K) and Firefox (2.7K).
• The top operating systems are iPhone (29.1K), Android (20.8K), Windows (19.6K), Mac (10.8K), Android Tablet (3.8K), Linux (2.4K), iPad (1.2K) and Chrome (1.2K).

Conclusion

Ultimately, wherever you’re from, and however you’ve ended up here, you’re all very welcome and I hope you keep coming back. Many thanks again for being part of my journey this past decade!