PPND – 2009 in Review

We had a busy and bumpy year at PPND, moving closer to our 1 millionth page view, passing the 2000 mark on email subscribers, launching a Spanish-language version to augment our English and Chinese versions, publishing the first book in a PPND series, and other adventures.

Counting Things
I love to count things, so I’ve pulled together the table below comparing numbers from 2009 with numbers going back to the start of the site on January 1, 2007. All numbers are approximate, and some may be undercounted since, for example, we did not get Google Analytics working to count site visits and pageviews on the new site, launched on October 14th, until December 7th. We’re thinking about how to celebrate when we cross the 1 millionth pageview — something that will probably happen in the first half of 2010.

 

So why do we care about the numbers?

• They demonstrate the growing interest in the intersection between research and practice in the relatively new field of positive psychology.
• They show the reach of the articles published in PPND.
  • If you are a researcher or practitioner of positive psychology — very broadly defined — we invite you to consider publishing articles here. See our editorial policy.
  • If you are a researcher trying to recruit a broad range of subjects for a study, consider making the request through a PPND article. Aaron Jarden did so, and he reports “I’m still very grateful – the study has taken off and is now in eleven languages.” They expect to report some of the initial findings at an Australian positive psychology conference this year.
  • If you’ve written a book related to positive psychology, consider having it reviewed here. See our book review practices. See also the list of books we have previously reviewed.
  • If you’re organizing a conference, consider providing a press pass to a PPND reviewer. See the list of conferences that we’ve summarized for our readers.

Email Subscribers
For a long time, we had half of our email subscribers on one service and half on FeedBlitz. Recently we consolidated them all on FeedBlitz, with the advantage to subscribers that the article title appears in the subject line. If you happen to be getting two copies of every article, click here for what to do. As you can see from the FeedBlitz counter on the top of the page, our subscriber number is steadily climbing.

	2009	Entire Existence
Articles Published:	232	621
Comments:	1860	5200
Authors:	43	60
Visits:	195,004	442,082
Page views:	359,376	892,587
Book Reviews:	19	35
Conference Announcements:	6	8
Conference Summaries:	15	28
Interviews:	5	10

Most Commonly Accessed Articles
The ten articles accessed most frequently are listed below from highest to lowest hit rate. Most of them were published in 2007, so have had longer than recent articles to be found by readers.

1. The Law of the Garbage Truck by David J. Pollay
2. What is Positive Psychology by Senia Maymin
3. Why Seeing “The Bucket List” Might Change Your Life & Make You Happy by Caroline Miller (This relates to the book later published by Caroline and Mike Frisch, Creating Your Best Life.
4. Divorce: Better versus Bitter by Kirsten Cronlund
5. Using Your Strengths in a Job Search by Senia Maymin
6. Positive Psychology – It’s So Much More Than Happiness! by Sherri Fisher
7. Create New Habits: The Good Constraints by Senia Maymin
8. Learning Optimism by Doug Turner
9. How You Tell the Story of Your Life by Senia Maymin
10. Michael Phelps: Psychological Anatomy of His Success by Timothy T. C. So

If you are a long-time reader:

• You can change from receiving two emails. If you are receiving two copies of every email, you can either fix it yourself or wait patiently until we fix it. To fix it yourself, click on the unsubscribe link in one of the articles from the old service — that is, one without the title in the subject line. If you happen to unsubscribe from the new service by accident, you can always resubscribe — see top left corner of the page. If you’d rather let us do it, that’s fine. We plan to clean out the old service, but first we wanted to make sure everybody had been shifted properly.
• Please do learn from our lesson in weathering a major outage. The company that was hosting our website went out of business. Yes, that’s right. it was a shock to us. This literally took our site down for over a week. This is a good reminder for everyone to check your backup practices. We were backing up our publication on the same server that hosted the site, so now we backup outside the server. When we first relaunched the site with its redesigned appearance, all articles between July 18th and October 14th were missing. Now we have recovered them all, and are working on restoring missing images in articles back to May 2009.

Image
Abacus courtesy of allspice1