Website Management
By Paul VanRaden
January 4, 2026 (updated July 1)
Topics
Usage Statistics
History and Experience
Usage Statistics
In the first 6 months of 2026, total
traffic doubled and page views were 1.5 times as frequent as in 2025. Traffic
statistics for years 2014 to present are in Table 1.
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. 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 did not 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 eventually 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.
Table 1. Visitors and total pages visited by
year for website paulvanraden.com over its history 2014-2026. Estimates for
2026 are twice the mid-year counts.
|
Year |
Unique visitors |
Total pages |
|
2026 |
26,046 |
51,654 |
|
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
In the first half of 2026, What I Did Last Week
is again second most popular page with 587 views. The most popular is again Simple Calendars
with 1,162 views and third most popular is Cones can be Greater than
Pyramids with 431, both featuring Egyptian technology from several thousand
years ago. Fourth is Masses are Pushed,
not Pulled, Toward Each Other with 429, and fifth is Editorials for Migration
written by the Wall Street Journal in 1973-93 with 422 views. Their editorials prove
that Americans thought more clearly in earlier decades before many gave their
minds to Trump and now Republicans hate what made America great.
In year 2025, 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 in 2025. 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 (AIP) 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 AIP 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, niece.
“Many
others and I really enjoy reading your weekly task summaries and annual reports.
They are always very insightful.” 2025. Dr. George Liu, USDA Animal Genomics
and Improvement Lab, Beltsville, MD.
“I
enjoyed reading your posts on your personal website; thank you for continuing
to share your thinking with the field.” 2026. Dr. Jicai
Jiang, North Carolina State University.
“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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