The appearance of a new icon in my WordPress dashboard reminds me that this site has now been registered for a year. My first post was uploaded on 24 November 2012. The title of this piece, revealing a shocking lack of inspiration on my part, was Some opening thoughts (1). In this I wrote about policy and service challenges in health and social care.
In my first full 12 months of blogging I published 127 posts. I categorised each with one or more of the words appearing beneath the site’s title, and now reproduce here. The size of each word reflects the number of times the category has been used. ‘Research’ is my most-applied category, closely followed by ‘Mental health’. So no surprises there.
Looking at my viewer statistics I see that the Enduring posts page has been popular. This is pleasing, as I deliberately set this up as a way of keeping together my more substantial, often research-related, pieces. Individual posts attracting most views have included those relating to this year’s NPNR conference, nursing and the approved mental health professional (AMHP) role, and the research excellence framework.
The WordPress software I am using also allows me to track clicks, which are the links to other sites I have embedded in posts and pages that readers choose to follow. I see that, over the year, the onwards site which has been visited the most is the Cardiff University digital repository (ORCA). Again, this is pleasing, as this tells me that some people have been sufficiently interested to visit the place from where green open access versions of papers I have provided links to can be obtained. Most popular amongst downloaded articles has been Michael Coffey‘s and my paper on the mental health system’s wicked problems, which was also the first document I made available in this way. Next up are Michael’s and my paper on AMHPs and Davina Allen‘s and my paper on complex caring trajectories in community mental health.
Ben Hannigan's blog 