Website Management
By Paul VanRaden
January 4, 2026
Topics
Usage Statistics
History and Experience
Usage Statistics
In 2025, paulvanraden.com
had 12,791 unique visitors with 17,157 total including repeat visitors. They
viewed 24,941 pages and downloaded 34,747 total pages including repeats such as
if you reload or refresh a page to get updates. Of the pages viewed in 2025,
37% went to requestors in the United States, 20% to Japan, 12% to the European
Union and Great Britain, 11% to China, 10% to Russia, 2% to Canada, and the
remaining 8% went to 75 other countries. That agrees with my goal because I
really try to make my reports useful to the whole world to increase
international visits. Previously in 2024, 52% of pages went to the United
States, 15% to the European Union and Great Britain, 13% to China, and 7% to
Japan. The above statistics from awstats exclude the 34,346 pages and
63,738 total visits from web crawlers and robot visitors. Those are also
important because search engines inspect and index any new or updated pages to
help users quickly find the info you request.
Traffic to my site doubled after I
added security (https vs http) in January 2025 because search engines often
block or put warning messages on pages delivered by http. The content on my
site had no need to be secure because currently I provide only 1-way transfer
of plain, public web pages to you. The site does not send or receive any secret
info, but next year I might try managing a mailing list to send out what I did
each Sunday instead of making you remember to check that page
once in a while. Web traffic doubled again in the rest of the year as I added
more, free, interesting pages. Total traffic in 2025 was 3.7 times higher than
2024. Traffic statistics for years 2014 to present are in Table 1.
Table 1. Visitors and total pages visited by
year for website paulvanraden.com over its history 2014-2025.
|
Year |
Unique visitors |
Total pages |
|
2025 |
12,791 |
34,747 |
|
2024 |
3,967 |
9,308 |
|
2023 |
2,477 |
5,785 |
|
2022 |
2,195 |
4,400 |
|
2021 |
2,174 |
4,263 |
|
2020 |
1,222 |
2,900 |
|
2019 |
1,310 |
4,322 |
|
2018 |
1,006 |
4,697 |
|
2017 |
980 |
2,991 |
|
2016 |
565 |
1,436 |
|
2015 |
900 |
1,583 |
|
2014* |
87 |
306 |
*
Last 3 months of 2014
The most popular individual pages were
1,453 downloads of Simple Calendars, 943 of What I Did Last Week,
and 489 of Defend
Your Government about Trump’s attack on research at USDA. The 2nd
and 3rd reports were new this year. In previous years, my new
reports took a long time to catch on, but now my main pages list the years that
reports were last updated, and What I Did Last Week helps launch new reports
and announce updates so more people will see those pages. The top 15 pages this
year are listed in Table 2 and their counts from last year are also listed.
Table 2. Pages with most views in 2025 and
views from 2024 for comparison.
|
Page |
Page_Views |
|
|
|
2025 |
2024 |
|
1,453 |
195 |
|
|
943 |
new |
|
|
489 |
new |
|
|
434 |
196 |
|
|
406 |
68 |
|
|
386 |
204 |
|
|
380 |
161 |
|
|
378 |
208 |
|
|
364 |
105 |
|
|
345 |
new |
|
|
336 |
200 |
|
|
335 |
116 |
|
|
330 |
173 |
|
|
316 |
134 |
|
|
315 |
new |
|
None of my reports go viral like pages
do on social media sites. Some algorithms may recommend that all users click on
the most popular story that day. People rarely search directly for new ideas
because they expect the internet to store mostly old ideas, and few people
forward interesting links that they found to their friends because their
friends already have more social media than they can look at. Publishers do not
promote free content, and I do not pay social media or search engines to give
my pages a higher rating in their algorithms like major companies can. Reports
I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s do not go viral but are still useful and
popular, showing that good ideas can last a lifetime and maybe many more
generations after that.
How to Manage
Electronic distribution now gives us
many ways to easily share information. Many people use social media, but those
pages often are not fully public if others need to set up an account or share
their email address to the media company before seeing your content. Media
companies can make big profits from delivering your content, but some services
can give you income if your content gets popular because the company sells
advertisements that viewers of your content will see. I decided to pay a little
extra for a fully public website to give readers a more pleasant experience,
also because for decades my reports were free to the public in scientific
journal articles and on our
government website. I chose a .com extension for my personal site to allow
future commercial sales but do not need income now.
What file type each report should have
is an important decision. Many of my reports include only text to read, and .htm
(hyper text markup language) is the best choice for those, allowing the text
displayed per line to adapt to the size of your phone or PC screen. You can
improve ease of reading by rotating your phone to the side to show landscape or
portrait or change your PC screen’s zoom level to get more words with smaller
font or fewer words with larger font. I use 20-point font to improve
readability on phones, which are 27% (21% iOS + 6% Android) of the views vs 69%
viewed on PC (44% Windows + 18% Mac + 7% Linux) plus 4% unknown devices.
Of all files downloaded 68% were .htm
but those were only 1% of the bytes downloaded (bandwidth). Picture and
graphics files were 64% of the bytes because they are larger. Those are mostly
created in .pptx but then are posted in .pdf if they do not include audio or
video. Audio and video files (.m4a and .mp4) are even larger and were 34% of
the bytes downloaded. Another 1% of bytes were individual image files. I create
most reports in MS Word and could post .docx but I’m not sure how other
operating systems will display those. I stopped putting images into my .htm
files because a bug in MS Word can randomly reassign image numbers when posting
in .htm, causing the wrong or no images to be displayed. Then I must either
rename the image files or edit the image names within the .htm files using
Notepad to fix Microsoft’s mistakes.
Internally I keep a flat layout with
all files in one location and no subdirectories to simplify finding and
transferring the latest modified files from my personal computer to the website
each week. Also that allows names to stay the same when reorganizing the
display layout. If files move to a new name, search engines also reset their
page counts to 0. That happened with the .pptx files that are now posted in
.pdf format.
While writing this I realized it was
time to add an XML sitemap and did
that for free last week at XML-sitemaps.com.
They generated a sitemap.xml by crawling my 86 pages in about 10 minutes. After downloading their file and uploading it
to my website, I went to Google Search console and they generated an .html file for
me specific for their browser. After downloading their file, I uploaded it also
to my website. Those steps took less than a half hour, but too early to tell if
the sitemap files will help raise the ratings of my pages in their search
engine. Small sites may get small benefits.
Cost
Costs for a personal website are low
and include hosting, domain, and SSL fees. The cost for web hosting was $108
from GoDaddy for 2025, and the cost ten years ago was $84 / year. Last year I
also paid a one-time cost of $22 to reserve the website name paulvanraden.com for another
9 years ($2.44 / year) and I paid SSLs.com only $18 to get 5 years of security
certificates ($3.60 / year) for the https site. They send an email once per
year reminding me to install the new certificate which took me an hour or two
to remember the steps. I wrote those 9 steps down so next year installing the
certificate should go more smoothly. GoDaddy offered to fully manage the SSL
installation for $150 / year and SSLs.com offered to also do the installation
for $29 / year.
History and Experience
At USDA, our project managed a large,
complex website and I often helped design it. Team member Jill (Philpot) Lake spoke
at a major scientific meeting about the website and how to use it in 1998
when we first built it. Then Jill, who worked in the office next to mine for a
few years, got promoted to managing USDA’s national website in recent years.
Ashley Sanders reported
on the AIPL website again in 2002. In that website, our directory structure
for storing files did not match the public directory tree which sometimes made
managing the links and locating the pages more difficult.
Administrators within USDA or the
Agriculture Research Service often changed the layouts and navigation
categories, making their designs less suited to our specific users. USDA’s
latest layouts mostly display reports using data stored in a central database
for the whole U.S. Now, each lab’s website such as Animal
Genomics and Improvement Lab just pulls its reports from that central
database. Thus, we lost ability to see what reports are being read, and many
labs gave up even adding specific content due to centralized control.
In 2013, our former Animal Improvement
Programs website was split into 2 halves when the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding (CDCB)
agreed to manage the data flow and provide routine computing services so that
USDA scientists could focus on research. The AIPL website at USDA kept the
scientific publication and explanation pages and CDCB’s website inherited the
data exchange and service pages. CDCB then revised, expanded, and improved the
content several times, but in the process deleted many of the links and
evaluation change memos from the former News page. While revising websites,
make sure you do not accidentally remove important content from the previous
pages.
In 1999, I posted several personal reports and my book The Right To Migrate
for free on AOL Hometown because
many of my best ideas did not fit into science journals. After it was shut
down in 2008, I transferred those pages onto my Verizon website, and they were
public, but search engines never found them. In 2014, I transferred those pages
to this paulvanraden.com website. I thought of the title Solutions To
World Problems in about 1985 after reading all materials available on many
topics in the Iowa State University library and realizing that I had further
answers well beyond those yet published. In 2023 I started the Solutions To Personal
Problems section telling how I live my life which might provide clues on
how to live your life. My habit of giving answers for free came from 37 years
of publishing free predictions and free reports funded by the US taxpayers.
Thank you.
Since
May 2025 when I retired, this website has become almost a fulltime hobby. I
hope you enjoy it too. I do not have any Like buttons to push, but if you like
any reports you can send those links to others, and next year I will again list
what reports people read most in 2026.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Hossein Jorjani for
helpful suggestions. Since retiring from Interbull, Hossein manages his personal website like mine.
Visitor Comments
“WOW!!! Thank you for sharing all of this!! I looked
through it all – brought tears to my eyes. Beautiful memories are so helpful
when dealing with a loss.” 2026. Margo Vento, neighbor.
“I’ve
been enjoying your weekly updates – inspiring you to continue them in
retirement is perhaps the best thing this administration has done. Beltsville
closing will certainly have a negative impact on scientific progress in
agriculture.” 2025. Dr. Bailey Basiel, University of Vermont.
“Thanks
Paul. Great blog!” 2025. Dr. Francisco Peñagaricano, University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
“This
is awesome, Paul. I’m referring to your website. Thank you for doing this.”
2025. Shauna Miller, Journal of Dairy Science, Urbana, IL.
“I
feel great that both of us share so much the world views. I feel so delighted
when reading your diaries or notes. Keep writing!” 2025. Dr. Zengting Liu, VIT,
Germany.
“I
enjoy reading all the content on paulvanraden.com. I've found it very
inspiring. Thank you for sharing such great ideas. I am originally from Egypt
and most of your ideas strongly resonate with many values I grow up with.
Wishing you all the best.” 2025. Dr.
Mohammed Abdallah Sallam, Aarhus University, Denmark.
“Harley
and I read your 2025 report on your life and absolutely loved it and totally
agree with you! Thanks for sharing part of your life with us.” 2025. Hallie
Kent, Richmond, VA.
“Many
others and I really enjoy reading your weekly task summaries and annual
reports. They are always very insightful.” Dr. George Liu, USDA Animal Genomics
and Improvement Lab, Beltsville, MD.
“I
had a quick look at your web site. I must admit it was an impressive sight. My
son, who is 19 years old now, has asked me several times to write some sort of
autobiography. After looking at your web site, I am very much encouraged to do
so. Let’s see if I manage to turn promises into real actions! Nice work.” 2002.
Dr. Hossein Jorjani, Interbull
Centre, Sweden.
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