100th Post! (and other meta-stats)

Today marks a grand milestone. I'm not talking about runs scored, wickets taken, or matches played... this, readers, is the 100th post published to the PoppedStats blog! To celebrate the occasion, today's stats are not going to be about performances on the indoor cricket court, but about the blog itself.

The first post
The date of the first post was January 23, 2010. 
That was 1392 days ago, making an average of almost exactly one post every two weeks.

The blog started out very different to what it is now. Originally, it was not a used for posting regular stories and stats analysis, but rather just as a convenient place for me to host the "X-treme Stats" software, and to post regular updates to the data for that program.

X-treme Stats was a small program I wrote to enter and view detailed indoor cricket stats. Well, I started writing it. The early versions of it that appeared on this site had only a few features - player profiles, scorecards from each match, and lists of simple records such as highest scores and best bowling figures. Everything in the program was only in early stages (for example, the scorecards and player profiles were often incomplete or incorrect). The plan was to slowly add to, improve, and fix the software until it became a realisation of my original outrageously lavish vision of a truly "extreme" stats program.

I soon realised that doing that was going to be far more effort than I had anticipated; and so X-treme Stats was abandoned. I do still use it for entering the scorecard each week (that aspect of it works fine because that was the most important part - if you can't put info in, there's no stats at all).

Without the program, the blog evolved...

Statistics articles
Still wanting to provide the joy of stats, I took inspiration from the various statistics blogs and features that appear on the Cricinfo website. There, the authors take inspiration from a recent events or achievement, or from readers questions, and make an article about some statistics or other.

Although I (and apparently everyone else on the team) would ideally like a blog every week, the frequency of the posts has fluctuated. There's been patches of inspiration, where post after post would be written... and then quiet patches where nothing would appear for months.

The greatest example of this is the "Week of posts", where I wrote one entry each day of the week to make up for a long absence.

In recent times, I must thank Rian for keeping me on track, by repeatedly pointing out any week he doesn't have a blog to read. The frequency of posts has been well up since he started that.

Using that great cricket graph, "The Worm", here's a look at how the total posts have increased over time.

After a strong start, the second half of 2011 was a very slow period. You can also see that since mid-2012, there's been some pretty consistent blogging going on.

Comments
This is not a blog known for it's comments. Over the 100 posts, there have been comments on just 17 of them (which is actually more than I thought!) with a total of 30 comments.

The first ever post with a comment was this one. Congratulations, Rian, you were the first ever commenter!

And the most prominent comment-makers are:

Name	Comments
Owen	9
Brad	7
Xavier	5
Rian	3
Julian	2
Gareth	2
A.Pearson	1
Bhagyesh Patel	1

It seems the readers of this blog prefer just to absorb the information and put it to work improving their game...

Effect on the team
I was trying to think of posts which have influenced the way people in the team do things. The only one I can really come up with is the post about how a batting pair is influenced by who faces the first ball, which has caused Gareth the always face first when batting with Rian. If anyone knows of any others, why not make a comment...!


Popular Posts
I can see stats on the blogging website about how many visitors there have been. Apparently the stats as compiled by this site are easily (and often) corrupted by web crawlers used by search engines and various spamming somethingorothers. Irrespective of that, I'm going to list here the 10 posts which have apparently been the most visited over the years.

Some of them look like they may be genuinely popular, others perhaps not.

Post	Page visits
End of Season 2010: Season Totals	95
Fourth Ball: Bonus Stat	89
Batting Records ...the last laugh	35
End Of Season 2010: Season Averages and Comparisons	32
"The 9"	30
End of season 2010: Semi-Final Match Report	26
Chasing runs	25
Popped Collars vs Gold Diggers	25
A farce, but at least it was close	24
Summer 2010/11 Season Stats	24

End of season stats appear to be popular (speaking of which, I suppose I'd better do one for the season just gone!), with 4 entries in the top 10. Stories of unusual or controversial events are also popular - the achieving of 9 wicket types in one innings, the scorecard fiasco, and the highest ever individual score.

(and I've now signed up to use Google Analytics on this site, which is apparently more reliable, accurate, and gives more cool detailed stats)

Moar Statz!
While there are a bunch of other stats I could do about the blog, I probably should stop now, so I'll save the rest for post number 200!

Happy 100th, PoppedStats!!