Tag Archives: blog

February 9, 2020 · 11:12 am

10th anniversary of this blog

Ten years ago today, on the February 9th 2010, I started this blog. In the very first post. Since then, I have written over 670 articles.

For the first years I managed to write above 90 posts per year, or above 7 per month, but with the birth of the second child, job changes and other hobbies, in the last years I have struggled to write that much.

The main topics of the blog have been aviation, travelling, sports, book reviews…

Taking some words from a speech I gave in Toastmasters a few years ago about writing:

My friends and family suggested me to start a blog, and I gave it a try. At the beginning I mainly wrote about aerospace, about investing, then more about travelling, books, sports, personal experiences. […]

What is the main use I find in having a blog? I use it to reflect on some topics that I approach, forcing myself to research about them. To structure my thoughts. I use for record keeping. In the blog I keep a log of some of the routes I fly, or all the races I run, with the date, time, position… or a short description of the books I read. Today, there are very many situations in which I find myself talking about something and I say, “wait, I once read about this, or visited that… and wrote about it in the blog”. I look quickly for it and share it. It adds to the conversation.

Here’s to many more years of blogging!

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November 18, 2016 · 8:00 am

The most (and least) read of the first 600 posts

And with this entry the blog reaches 600 posts, a good number to make a recap to see which were the most and least read of the first 600 posts. (1)

Since I started the blog in February 2010, the blog has received over 280,000 visits and hundreds of comments.

Find below the list of the top 10 and bottom 10 posts:

1. Impuestos en Francia vs. España

2. Mi adiós a Ibercaja

3. Will Boeing 787 ever break-even?

4. Monaco GP Walking Tour

5. 787 Break Even for Dummies

6. Impuestos en Francia vs. España (actualización 2012)

7. Beluga vs. Dreamlifter

8. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts (2012)

9. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts (2013)

10. Patek Philippe Caliber 89

…

490. Ailes Anciennes Toulouse, Visites Cockpit (April 2016)

491. Special assistance vs. free ride

492. Kronborg castle and Hamlet

493. Musee Mecanique (San Francisco)

494. Flight excursion to Najac

495. Lincoln and U. S. Grant on the preservation of the Union

496. “Caimaneando”

497. The Spirit of St. Louis (book review)

498. Aerospace, a high-tech sector in Spain

499. Museu do Futebol (São Paulo)

As a curiosity, see below the evolution of the visits to the top 10 blog posts per year:

views-per-post-per-year-600

Let’s see what I’ll write about in the next 100 posts…

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(1) I wrote four such posts when I reached the first 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 posts in the blog.

NOTE: the box in the right showing “Current Top Posts” shows the most read ones in the last two days, not the all-time most read ones (the ones above).

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March 10, 2015 · 8:00 am

The most (and least) read of the first 500 posts

A classic post of the blog: a recap at each hundredth post dedicated to show which were the most and least read of the first 500 posts. (1)

Since I started the blog in February 2010, the blog has received over 207,000 visits and hundreds of comments.

Find below the list of the top 10 and bottom 10 posts:

1. Impuestos en Francia vs. España
2. Will Boeing 787 ever break-even?
3. Mi adiós a Ibercaja
4. 787 Break Even for Dummies
5. Monaco GP Walking Tour
6. Impuestos en Francia vs. España (actualización 2012)
7. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts (2012)
8. Beluga vs. Dreamlifter
9. Patek Philippe Caliber 89
10. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts (2011)
…

490. Resist the bias to act
491. Bill Clinton endorsing Kiva (video)
492. Risk
493. Europe Day
494. Nothing like a good red wine…
495. What charities do you support?
496. Bye, Vistalegre
497. Boulevards de Colomiers 2014
498. Special assistance vs. free ride
499. Wells Fargo History Museum at San Francisco

Let’s see what I’ll write in the next 100 posts…

—

(1) I wrote four such posts when I reached the first 100, 200, 300 and 400 posts in the blog.

NOTE: the box in the right showing “Current Top Posts” shows the most read ones in the last two days, not the all-time most read ones (the ones above).

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January 15, 2014 · 8:00 am

The most (and least) read of the first 400 posts

A classic post of the blog: a recap at each hundredth post dedicated to show which were the most and least read of the first 400 posts. (1)

Since I started the blog in February 2010, the blog has received over 118,000 visits and hundreds of comments.

Find below the list of the top 10 and bottom 10 posts:

1. Impuestos en Francia vs. España
2. Will Boeing 787 ever break-even?
3. 787 Break Even for Dummies
4. Mi adiós a Ibercaja
5. Impuestos en Francia vs. España (actualización 2012)
6. Monaco GP Walking Tour
7. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts (2012)
8. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts (2011)
9. Patek Philippe Caliber 89
10. Beluga vs. Dreamlifter
…

390. Ballesteros (the movie)
391. “Caimaneando”
392. From climbing to merely walking
393. De Feria en Feria
394. Not just another letter
395. The Art of War
396. Lowell Observatory
397. Casablanca
398. Book review: Pirate Latitudes
399. International Day of the Book

Let’s see what I’ll write in the next 100 posts…

—

(1) I wrote three just posts when I reached the first 100, 200 and 300 posts in the blog.

NOTE: the box in the right showing “Current Top Posts” shows the most read ones in the last two days, not the all-time most read ones (the ones above).

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January 10, 2013 · 8:00 am

Advertising in this blog

I started this blog in February 2010 as theblogbyjavier.wordpress.com . Sometime later I purchased an upgrade from WordPress acquiring the domain theblogbyjavier.com (initially for 25 $ per year, a bit expensive, though comfortable), that is why you don’t see the wordpress even if the blog is hosted in WordPress.com .

Among the conditions of WordPress to provide free hosting is that no advertising shall be included in the blog. However, you might have seen some advertisements at the bottom of the posts along these years. “How can that be?” When WordPress mentions no advertising, that means no ads included by the blogger (i.e. me), but WordPress has been indeed including ads from time to time. This is made if the blogger is not purchasing the option “No Ads“, for 30$ per year. I did not purchase it.

Some weeks ago I received an inquiry from a British advertising agency asking whether I would be interested in selling some advertising space. I knew it was against WordPress conditions and this blog is not aimed at being a profitable operation, thus I would not accept the offer. Nevertheless, I exchanged a couple of emails with the agent to know more about the proposal.

The offer consisted of including a link behind a word in one of my blog posts (a single word in a single post). The link would direct the reader to the advertised company. This is what they call unobtrusive advertising (it is funny that at the same time, a Spanish leading blogger, Enrique Dans, also wrote a post criticizing this kind of advertising practices in “¿En pleno 2012 y aún con estas tonterías?“ – in Spanish).

The proposal for that single link exceeded 100 $. This surprised me. I had previously researched how much one could expect to earn via Google AdSense depending on the traffic of a website, and the order of magnitude for a blog with the traffic of this one was below 100 $ per year.

Once I had left the offer aside, I took a look again about advertising possibilities within WordPress conditions, and I found out about a new program: WordAds.

This beta program had been running for over a year. Bloggers could apply for it and they would be accepted into it if the blog met some conditions. I applied. Few days later I got the confirmation that theblogbyjavier.com was accepted into the program as I announced it in Twitter:

The reader, you, will find some ads at the end of some posts. The same that happened beforehand, as I had not purchased the “No Ads” option. The only difference: now, I will earn some cash out of them. I don’t expect (nor intend) that sum to be big, but it will hopefully pay for the 26$ a year that the domain costs now. I will further comment when I start to see revenues.

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December 25, 2012 · 10:00 am

The best (and the worst) of the first 300 posts

This post is a classic of the blog: A hundredth post dedicated to show which were the most and least read of the first 300 posts. (I wrote two just posts when I reached the first 100 and 200 posts in the blog).

Since I started the blog in February 2010, the blog has received over 65,000 visits and hundreds of comments.

Find below the list of the top 10 and bottom 10 posts:

1. Will Boeing 787 ever break-even?
2. Impuestos en Francia vs. España
3. 787 Break Even for Dummies
4. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts (2011)
5. Patek Philippe Caliber 89
6. Mi adiós a Ibercaja
7. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts
8. Beluga vs. Dreamlifter
9. More on Boeing 787 break even
10. FC Barcelona copying Real Madrid
…

290. The origin of football in Spain
291. Opera with subtitles
292. “Caimaneando”
293. Resist the bias to act
294. Studios are more profitable than flats
295. Casablanca
296. De Feria en Feria
297. From climbing to merely walking
298. International Day of the Book
299. Book review: Pirate Latitudes

Comparing the lists to the previous 2 years ones: 7 posts of the 10 most read ones in 2011 are still there while only 2 remain from the most read after the first 100 posts. On the least read ones: 6 were in the list after 200 while only 3 in the list after 100.

Let’s see what I’ll write in the next 100 posts…

—

NOTE: the box in the right showing “Current Top Posts” shows the most read ones in the last two days, not the all-time most read ones (the ones above).

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July 8, 2012 · 12:00 pm

On why blog posts are read

Yesterday I wrote a post about the curiosity of seeing which blog posts are read more at different points in time. I pinpointed the case of a blog post related to taxes in France and Spain. I guessed that, referrals from the blog itself aside, this was due to the economic situation in Spain.

Now take the other top posts at the moment (prior to these last 2 posts were published):

Current Top Posts as of July 7th 2012.

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July 7, 2012 · 8:00 am

Brain drain or bank run?

A curiosity that comes with having a blog is that sometimes certain post starts to be read more and more and you keep wondering why. One plausible reason is clear and self-fulfilling: since the most read posts in the last few days appear at the right of the blog, readers may opt to read one of those after having read the post that brought them to the blog.

One of those post that it’s being read more and more recently is a comparison I made about income tax rates between Spain and France. I wrote it because I had some work colleagues who asked me about that, and instead of writing always the same answer I could refer them to the blog post.

See the stats below:

Stats of the post related to France income taxes.

In this particular case, and since the post it’s written and titled in Spanish, I decided to check the stats with the dates of the announcements of the bail outs of Bankia and Spain.

Another thought I have is: since the title is relatively vague “Taxes in Spain and France” (it does not mention “income” even if it only refers to income taxes), this keeps me wondering whether people arriving at this post are tempted to emigrate from Spain or to relocate their savings… brain drain or bank run? Sigh (as in lament).

To have a better view on that, and taking into account that my blog is not a special reference nor its low readership is representative of Spain, we could simply check with Google Trends. I started to look for it, but Google’s answer was “Your terms […] do not have enough search volume to show graphs”. Sigh (as in relief).

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May 25, 2012 · 8:00 am

Where do you come from?

WordPress introduced a feature showing the geographical origin of the visits to the blog back in February (find below a map offered by WordPress – the host service of this blog). After 3 months, I decided to take a look at those stats.

Readers’ origin map provided by WordPress.

In these three months the blog received slightly above 7,700 visits; over 2,000 came from the United States and above 1,300 came from Spain (my country of origin). The top ten countries of origin summed up 75% of the visits (USA, Spain, UK, France, Germany, Canada, NL, Australia, Ireland & India). Following the famous “80/20 rule” or a Pareto distribution, the top 20% of the countries of origin summed up 85% of the visits (out of 117 countries).

Pareto distribution of blog readers per country of origin.

Finally, I had the curiosity to analyze the origin by world region. For this purpose, I compared the proportion of readers to the proportion of world population, internet users and internet penetration per region (internet users/population).

Blog readers, world population, internet users and internet penetration.

Europe, mainly due to Spain (my family and most of friends’ origin), is overrepresented (higher % of readers in relation to internet users). The other two regions overrepresented among readership are North America and Oceania, this must be due to the fact that most of the blog’s articles are written in English. Those three regions are also the ones where internet penetration is the highest.

China. In the last 3 months my blog only received 8 visits from China, that is 0.1% of the visits. China with over 1.3 billion inhabitants represents almost 20% of the world population; it counts with over 500 million internet users, over 22% of  the total; and the internet penetration is above 38%. China is clearly underrepresented among the countries of origin of the readers of the blog (0.5%). Shall I start writing more about China or in chinese language?

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December 12, 2011 · 8:00 am

The best (and the worst) of the first 200 posts

About a year ago, I wrote in the 100th post which were the most and least read of the first 100 posts. Today is another such occasion as this is the 200th post in the blog.

I started the blog in February 2010. Since then the blog has received over 29,000 visits, hundreds of comments while I have enjoyed thinking about what to write and structuring my thoughts to do so.

If a year ago I wasn’t yet sure which kind of posts were better received, now it is much clearer: those related to aviation.

Find below the list of the top 10 and bottom 10 posts:

1. Will Boeing 787 ever break-even?
2. 787 Break Even for Dummies
3. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts
4. More on Boeing 787 break even
5. FC Barcelona copying Real Madrid
6. Algunas cifras de la industria cultural
7. Mi adiós a Ibercaja
8. An aircraft worth its weight in gold?
9. Boeing commercial aircraft discounts (update for 2010)
10. Beluga vs. Dreamlifter

…

190. Speech about Minifutbol
191. “Playas” in Lima
192. International Day of the Book
193. Bill Clinton endorsing Kiva (video)
194. Three centuries of confusion
195. De Feria en Feria
196. From climbing to merely walking
197. Nothing like a good red wine…
198. Opera with subtitles
199. Book review: Pirate Latitudes

I find it curious that only 3 posts of the 10 most read ones a year ago remain in the top 10 list, however 6 out of the 10 least read ones still remain in that list.

Let’s see what I’ll write in the next 100 posts…

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NOTE: the box in the right showing “Current Top Posts” shows the most read ones in the last two days, not the all-time most read ones (the ones above).

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