A year ago (on December 9th 2009), I wrote about founding R-bloggers.com, an (unofficial) online R journal written by bloggers who agreed to contribute their R articles to the site.

In this post I wish to celebrate R-bloggers’ first birthday by sharing with you:

1. Links to the top 14 posts of 2010
2. Reflections about the origin of R-bloggers
3. Statistics on “how well” R-bloggers did this year
4. Links to other related projects
5. An invitation for sponsors/supporters to help keep the site alive

1. Top 14 R posts of 2010

R-bloggers’ success is largely owed to the content submitted by the R bloggers themselves.  The R community currently has 143 active R bloggers (links to the blogs are clearly visible in the right navigation bar on the R-bloggers homepage).  In a little over one year, these bloggers wrote almost 3,000 posts about R.  That is amazing!

Here is a list of the top visited posts on the site in 2010:

• 100 Prisoners, 100 lines of code
• Google AI Challenge: Languages Used by the Best Programmers
• Getting Started with Sweave: R, LaTeX, Eclipse, StatET, & TeXlipse
• Why Use R?
• “simply start over and build something better”
• R Tutorial Series: R Beginner’s Guide and R Bloggers Updates
• Select operations on R data frames
• Hacker News User Base Changed?
• Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining
• Fantasy football (oops, soccer)
• Delete rows from R data frame
• Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R
• Advanced graphics in R
• How to build a world-beating predictive model using R

2. Motivation for creating R-bloggers

Originally, the idea for R-bloggers came when, over a year ago, I spent several hours trying to find bloggers who wrote about R.  I was successful in finding roughly 14 R bloggers (and too many blog posts of people talking about pirates).  This experience led me to wonder how many other people like myself were also struggling to find these bloggers.  The second thought I had was the answer to the following question: “What can I offer an R blogger so that he will tell me that he exists?”  The answer I came up with is “audience and traffic” – and that’s what R-bloggers tries to achieve: the site offers the blogger audience and traffic in exchange for the blogger giving permission to republish their “R content” on the site.

Part of my motivation was that, as one of these bloggers who wrote about R (here, on R-statistics.com), I too hoped to gain more audience and traffic for my content.   R-bloggers helped me achieve this goal.

3. Statistics – how well did R-bloggers do this year

There are several matrices one can consider when evaluating the success of a website.  I’ll present a few of them here and will begin by talking about the visitors to the site.

This year, the site was visited by about 286,000 “Absolute Unique Visitors.”  There was a total of nearly 600,000 visits and over 1 million page-views.  People have surfed the site from over 200 countries, with the greatest number of visitors coming from the United States (40%) and then followed by the United Kingdom (6.8%), Germany (6.6%), Canada (4.9%), France (3.3%), and other countries.

The site has received between 15,000 to 25,000 visits a week in the past few months, and I suspect this number will remain stable in the next few months (unless something very interesting will happen).

I believe this number will stay constant thanks to visitors’ loyalty: 60% of the site’s visits came from returning users.

Another indicator of reader loyalty is the number of subscribers to R-bloggers as counted by feedburner, which includes both RSS readers and e-mail subscribers.  The range of subscribers is estimated to be between 2600 to 2900.

Thus it seems that R-bloggers succeeds in offering a real service to the R users community.

4. Projects related to R-bloggers

During the last year I have created several R-bloggers clone sites in the hopes of serving other audiences.  I started a multilingual version of R-bloggers at www.r-bloggers.com/lang/ (currently hosting 7 bloggers, written in Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish).  I hope more will join the site in the future.

I’ve also started 3 other promising such sites: SAS-x.com, DanceBloggers.com and forex-bloggers.com.  How will they do?  Only time will tell.

5. Invitation to sponsor/advertise on R-bloggers

Due to the increase in the site’s popularity, 4 months ago I had to upgrade R-bloggers’ hosting account to a VPS hosting, which had directed me to decide on attempting to add ads to R-bloggers so to keep the site self sufficient financially.

So in the hopes of keeping the site sustainable in the long run, I am now (somewhat forced) to make this call: if you are interested in sponsoring/placing ads/supporting R-bloggers, then you’re welcome to contact me.

Happy new year!
Yours,
Tal Galili

Today I came across a post named “24 Noble WordPress Plugins To Determine The Performance of your Blog” through Weblog Tools Collection (one of my favorite places to stay updates on wordpress). The post provided a good solid list of statistics plugins for wordpress. Some of them are too old to count (pun intended), others are much more recent and relevant.

As a statistics (and WordPress) lover myself, I was inspired to extend the list of wordpress statistics plugins for the hope of benefiting the community:
Blog Metrics
This plugin is based on ideas in an excellent post by Avinash Kaushik (Whom I consider a Web analytics guru and a brilliant blogger!).

it calculates:

• Raw Author Contribution:
  • average number of posts per month
  • average number of words per post
• Conversation Rate:
  • average number of comments per postwithout your own comments
  • average number of words used in comments to posts

Both for all the time you’ve been blogging, and for the last month, it then adds these values in a page on your WordPress dashboard.

Search Meter

This plugin is a must for any blogger. Period.

If you have a Search box on your blog, Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for — and whether they are finding what they are looking for. Search Meter’s admin interface shows you what people have been searching for in the last couple of days, and in the last week or month. It also shows you which searches have been unsuccessful. If people search your blog and get no results, they’ll probably go elsewhere. With Search Meter, you’ll be able to find out what people are searching for, and give them what they want by creating new posts on those topics.  [...]

Google analytics Dashboard

Google Analytics Dashboard gives you the ability to view your Google Analytics data in your WordPress dashboard. You can also alow other users to see the same dashboard information when they are logged in or embed parts of the data into posts or as part of your theme.

The biggest advantage of this plugin in my view is that it adds sparklines in the “posts -> edit” page in the admin area.

Analytics360
I don’t use this one much. But one feature it has that I find interesting is that is adds information of when you posted something with the trend line of the google analytics traffic data. It also mixes data from MailChimp’s, which I don’t use.

MailChimp’s Analytics360 plugin allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress.

Broken Link Checker
This plugin is also a must.

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
• Also detects redirected links.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Link checking intervals can be configured.
• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.
• Searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text and so on is also possible.
• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

Piwik + WP-Piwik

This plugin adds a Piwik stats site to your WordPress dashboard. It’s also able to add the Piwik tracking code to your blog.
Piwik is an open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed real time reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages and so on…

You can install Piwik more or less like you install WordPress, and then you are left to integrate it into your blog. The only real down side of it for me (compared to google analytics) is the advanced segmentation and pivoting. But in general it is a free, great (and growing!) Web analytics solution.

Woopra Analytics Plugin
I have been using Woopra since their release thanks to lorelle. I enjoy the ability to follow the live actions that are happening inside the blog. Although since woopra went from BETA to GOLD, I lost most interest because the total blogs I track have more traffic volume then woopra allow tracking in their free account. But small bloggers could find the service gratifying.

Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.

Features include:

• Live Tracking and Web Statistics
• A rich user interface and client monitoring application
• Real-time Analytics
• Manage Multiple Blogs and Websites
• Deep analytic and search capabilities
• Click-to-chat
• Visitor and member tagging
• Real-time notifications
• Easy Installation and Update Notification

Final notes

If you are into web analytics, I also encourage you to give the following a try: Nuconomy,ClickTale, Crazy Egg. And of course, Google analytics. Each of them (and also Woopra) strips you and your visitors a bit more from their privacy. But that is the ultimate price we pay for the strong Web analytics solutions that exists out there.
If you got any more statistics plugins I missed, feel encouraged to share them with me in the comments