Greener Leith Blog: 2011 in review - Biomass, mooncups and bicycles
December 27, 2011 by Ally Before we go any further, it's important to make clear that this isn't the Greener Leith Annual Report. We've still to get that online.
This is intended to be a quick look back at the year on this website - to show you what the most well read blog posts on the Greener Leith blog were. As the graph above should hopefully show (it may not work in all browsers - if it doesn't click here), traffic has grown steadily this year to our website, despite the fact that it's been managed entirely by volunteers for most of the last 12 months.
According to Google Analytics, the last twelve months have seen record numbers of vistors to the site. We had:
- 73,851 Page views
- 40,115 Visits
- 25,383 Unique Visitors
And according to Mailchimp, who provides our email service, each week at least a third of our 700 email subscribers read our weekly email update from the blog.
So, not a huge website, but nevertheless, we're still pretty happy that the numbers of people reading our blog is still going up, even though we have less resources to throw at it.
Perhaps surprisingly the most popular blog post on our site this year was this one, which reported on the fire at the Tail-end chippy on Leith Walk in January. Clearly there were lots of people worried about where they would get their next chip supper. That blog post featured a photograph taken by local resident Mark Sheffield.
In February, our second most popular blog post of the year arrived. We published 10 facts Forth Energy won't tell you about their giant power plant plan, just in time for a heated public meeting on the proposals.
This year we've been very lucky to have Emily Dodd contributing to the blog. In May she bravely launched into a series of blog posts on a green topic many might steer clear of - environmentally friendly feminine hygeine product, the Mooncup. Despite, or perhaps because, she advised men to look away right at the beggining of her series of Mooncup Monday posts - her first one comes in at number three.
However, regular readers of the Greener Leith blog will already be familiar with Ms Dodd's fearless nature. In number four spot is her January attempt to get us all to sign up to 19 Green New Years Resolutions by jumping in the Firth of Forth on New Years Day. If you haven't managed to stick to all 19 - many might be worth adopting this year. You can find them here.
In fifth place we have an interesting blog post. The No Leith Biomass campaign managed to put together a Google Earth file that anyone could download and use to see what the proposed Forth Energy powerplant could look like from any viewpoint they chose. In this blog post we shared the Google Earth file and invited people to share their views of the proposals. Here's some that were subsequently made by Tony Leach:
Find more photos like this on The Greener Leith Social
In sixth place we have the third part of the Mooncup Monday series where three Leithers gave their initial feedback on using aforementioned feminie hygeine product. The comments got quite graphic, so without further ado we shall move onto the blog post in seventh place which is...
....about Christmas Hampers. Another post by Emily, this one called on Leithers to donate food to the local Destiny Church Christmas Hamper appeal.
And, bringing up the tail-end of the top 10 blog post of the year on Greener Leith are three posts about cycling. In eighth place is our post which provides not one, but two free, downloadable, and very different cycle maps of Leith.
In ninth place, was our post that mapped out serious accidents in Edinburgh that involved cyclists in 2010, in an effort to get a better understanding of the risks associated with cycling on pavements.
And lastly, in tenth place, was a post highlighting an offer by council officers interested in helping tenement dwellers to find better ways to store their bikes.
Incidentally, you may be interested to know where all these visitors came from. We'd also like to thank these sites for helping to spread the word. Here's our top 15 traffic sources for the last 12 months:
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Guardian
4. Energyshare
8. Stumbleupon
9. Aunty Emily
10. The List
11. STV Edinburgh
12. No Leith Biomass
13. Leith Festival
We'd obviously like to thank everyone who has helped make 2011 our best online year yet, whether you are a reader, a writer, a Facebook friend, a blogger or a Twitter follower.
Of course, any neighbourhood website worth its salt is not just about the stats. This year we wrote about a hugely varied amount of topics, including a number of themed series. For example, Leith Links Community Councillor, Angus Miller who by day runs Geowalks, helped us make five short Leith Rocks podcasts which you can find here.
Juliet Wilson, who is a keen Water of Leith Conservation Trust volunteer, has written a series of guest posts for the blog this year - mostly about the common birds you might see on the river. You can see all her posts in one place here.
We've had Edinburgh University graduate, and founder of gocarshare.com, writing about collaborative consumption, we've had a thoughtful piece by local resident Colin Brown, who wrote about his walk around Western Harbour, we've featured the prize winning grand designs for the Shrubhill brownfield site of another local graduate, Michael Bryan and we've had plenty of opinion pieces like this one, by our Chairperson, Charlotte Encombe, calling for the council to do more to repair Leith after the collapse of the Edinburgh tram project.
And of course regular readers cannot fail to have noticed that we've produced a whole series of Zero Waste podcasts. You can find them all here - but if you only have time to listen to one then the editors pick so far is probably the one presented by Leith Primary School pupils which looks at what they're doing to cut waste in their school.
Please do let us know how you think we can improve our blog for 2012 - and if you'd like to write a post for our blog, please do get in touch.
Greener Leith Social Media, blog 
Reader Comments