And… we’re back!

It’s been almost two years since I added a new post to my marine biology blog.

I’ve been busy.

But while I was neglecting my blog a crazy thing happened: traffic increased.

Here is a screenshot of my blog traffic for the last month:

For the first year of this blog, ten visitors in a day was a huge haul. Now, it’s the average. I realize that this is miniscule compared to a lot of blogs, but still…

So, what kinds of things are people coming to my blog for? Mostly they’re looking at the practical bioinformatics pieces. My two most popular posts seem to be: Making haplotype networks in R, and Quick N50 and N90 calculation in R.

https://johnbhorne.wordpress.com/2016/09/15/still-making-haplotype-networks-the-old-way-how-to-do-it-in-r/

https://johnbhorne.wordpress.com/2016/06/11/quick-n50-and-n90-calculation-in-r/

On February 26th, making haplotype networks received an amazing 17 views. And on March 7th it got ten. Clearly there are a lot of people still making haplotype networks these days. To be honest, I haven’t needed to make one in a long time, but I am glad that this post has been helpful to other people.

The best is yet to come

As I do my job I’m constantly figuring out new ways to work in Unix, Python, and R. I write the blog posts because it feels like a waste to keep all this code to myself. I suppose I could put it on Github, and sometimes I do (https://github.com/jh041), but Github is a little too formal for my tastes.

When I’m in the R terminal, or running Python interactively in the unix terminal, I feel like I’m at a workbench, where I have tools to manipulate data, and analyze it. Sometimes I arrange my finished product into a reusable code that can be rerun on any data set, but I’m more interested in the small details of the code than the final product.

There aren’t enough places on the internet where people are sharing not only the code they’ve written but sharing the step-by-step explanations of that code… for people who may not be bioinformatics studs. I think this is the reason why my post on making haplotype networks is so popular.

So, in 2019, as I resurect the blog, I am going to focus more on detailed, practical posts that anybody can follow and use. Even if they don’t have a strong background in bioinformatics.

Some things to watch out for in the coming weeks and months:

• haplotyping SNP markers from PCR amplicons for mixed-stock fishery analysis.
• Relatedness analysis in R.
• The joys of nanopore sequencing.