2025 in review: a good year
Following on from my 2024, 2023, 2021 and 2020 wrap-up posts, I’m back for another year in review. This marks 6 years of running my blog. Similar to last year, I did a lot of blogging about my hikes, totalling 46 posts, plus a random spread of book reviews, photos and notes - and so my total output for this year was a solid 80 - 90 pieces of content.
Life has its ups and downs, and 2025 was definitely an “up” year for me. I visited China, Switzerland and Australia, hiked a bunch of cool mountains and even joined Hardcover. It was a lot of fun looking back on this year, and I’m hoping I can continue this upward trend into 2026.
Site statistics: page views in 2025
As is tradition, I’ll start off this post by going over the blog’s stats for the year.
A fair few of my site’s page views come from people searching something in Google, and then stumbling across my blog. This year, I got 90,000 clicks from Google search.
This is double last year’s count of 45,000.
I also use another analytics provider called Umami for page views, which I started using towards the end of 2024. Umami only retains 6 months of data for free plans, and although you can export it (and I did) the data that got exported didn’t provide an accurate date range, so I don’t have the exact breakdown for 2025.
As a side note, since October, some portion of my Umami page views are from suspected bot users. They tend to be coming from Singapore, which seems to be a problem others are experiencing as well. Of course Singapore is quite close to Japan, so some Singaporean visitors are real users who are perhaps interested in visiting Japan to go for a hike. Playing around with the analytics I think I can guess that at least 6,000 of the page views I’ve gotten in the last couple of months are from these bots.
(One identifier is that they tend to have really short visit times, rather than spending some time reading the blog post like a human would).
So what’s the actual page view total?
I would say I got in the ballpark of 200,000 page views this year! Although this is a big jump from 2024, I probably got around the same amount of views in 2022-2023 when my programming blog was at its peak. I think if I can get a bit more growth next year I will reach a new “page views per year” milestone.
I have a screenshot here of the last 6 months, which was 135k views (125k excluding the bots).
I’ll take a screenshot at the mid-year point next year so I can get a better overview of the analytics for 2026.
My most popular posts in 2025
In last year’s post, I mentioned that although I wrote so many hiking blog posts in 2024, most of them went unread because people don’t know the names of all these niche mountains that I climb, so they don’t think to Google for them.
I hypothesised that I needed to write more wrap-up style posts to help people discover my blog, which turned out to be a very good hypothesis. My most popular posts this year were my round-up posts on the best day hikes near Tokyo and hikes with a view of Mt Fuji. In third place was my programming post introducing Cursor, an AI IDE.
In an unexpected turn of events, my post on Greek yogurt in Japan was also quite popular in the first half of 2025, which I wrote completely randomly just because I really love Greek yogurt. Similarly, a travel blog I wrote for Kunming’s Stone Forest in China has ranked on the first page of Google and gets a decent amount of hits.
I suppose the moral of the story is that it can be quite good to diversify.
Home page design
I have updated the design of my home page a little this year.
I like to colour code the posts in each category in different colours to make it a bit easier to browse. This year I have added an image or icon next to each post to make it a little more visually appealing as well. I also added a link out to my RSS feed since I’ve been occasionally asked for that.
Picking up photography
Previously, all the photos I took on my hikes were with my iPhone. With the amount of photos I was uploading to the blog, I decided to make the leap to a real camera and bought a Fujifilm X-T5. I did think iPhone photos were pretty good, so I wasn’t sure if the Fujifilm was going to be worth it, but I feel like the quality of my photos has gone up, and it’s fun being able to take more zoomed in photos of things. Unexpectedly, taking photos of birds is quite fun so I’ve become a bit of a birdwatcher as well.
I now cross-post all of the photos from my Instagram to the new photography section on my blog.
I’ll admit I’m not completely satisfied with the design of this, but I think it works well enough for the moment.
Adding a new notes section to my blog
And the final addition to my blog this year was the notes section in December. I’ve done a recent write-up about how I built it so I’ll leave the details of that for you to check out in that post.
My main motivation is I just needed a place to put a lot of my things which aren’t quite “proper” blog posts, but I want a place for them to live on my blog nonetheless. Quite keen to grow this section in 2026!
Social media
Bluesky
My Bluesky account grew from 45 followers in 2024 to 418 in 2025, which is pretty huge growth. I actually spent most of 2025 slowly making my way up to the low 100s, but suddenly had 300 new followers after I got featured in the Developers Who Write starter pack (a big thank you to Brittany!)
Bluesky starter packs are a feature which lets users mass-follow everyone who is listed in a pack - so my new followers all followed me and 100 others in one go. My general sense of Bluesky (being an ex-Twitter user) is that follower counts tend to be a bit inflated, and you can have a lot of followers but not actually get a lot of interaction with the content you post so I don’t take that follower number too seriously (but it’s still cool to see).
I’ll admit I still have a bit of a struggle when it comes to posting enough on Bluesky, so at the minimum I try and share the latest blog posts I’ve written.
In a surprise bit of growth, my Instagram account also grew from 118 followers to 362 this year. I mentioned last year that I post on there quite infrequently, but after I bought my camera in April, I started posting a set of photos for each of my new hiking blog posts. And that seems to have done the trick, as I’ve gained a steady trickle of new followers over 2025.
I think most of my hiking readership doesn’t use Bluesky, so Instagram is their main avenue where they can reach out to me. It’s been really heart-warming to see the DMs I get from people thanking me for the hiking advice. I’m glad my info is of use to people and it’s one of the main reasons why I’m doing this.
Newsletter
And then with barely any growth at all is my newsletter, which went from 95 subscribers to 126 subscribers.
I think this is fairly self-inflicted, as I was quite half-hearted in my newsletter attempts. There’s multiple avenues I could take to increase my subscriber count - like adding “subscribe” pop-ups or forms in the middle or end of my blog posts, or doing a bit more of a promotional “if you want to see more content like this, please subscribe!” on Bluesky or places like that. Overall I felt quite “ehh” at the concept of a newsletter, and I was only really doing it because I had heard that it’s always a good idea for bloggers to have newsletters.
In saying that, I went back through and skimmed all 12 of the newsletter editions I released this year - and it’s actually not as bad as I thought it was. It’s kind of nice to look back on as a summary of how my 2025 went. I think the main selling point of my newsletter at the moment is it is a touch more personal than my regular blog content - and for people who don’t use Bluesky or Instagram, it’s an easy way to keep up with what I’ve been writing recently. I think I need to lean into that a bit more for 2026.
One thing I’m thinking of is whether I move away from doing it on the first day of the month (sometimes it feels a bit rushed trying to fit it in, or I don’t always have much to say), or integrating it a bit better with my blog - I feel like I might put a bit more effort into it if I treated it a bit more like something I publish on the blog itself.
Being featured on People & Blogs
I also had the honour of being featured in Manu’s weekly newsletter People and Blogs, and was the 101st blogger featured. Secretly it was one of my 2025 goals to be featured among a list of so many cool people, so I was super stoked I got the opportunity. I’ll also be honest and reveal here that I actually self-nominated myself for this one. I noticed another previous blogger who was featured had also mentioned that they had self-nominated, so I figured what the heck, it couldn’t hurt to reach out to Manu and he was gracious enough to include me on his blog, so thank you!
Working on Hardcover
In a completely unplanned turn of events, I also picked up a part-time “job” as a software engineer on Hardcover, a book tracking app. I say job in quotes since although we are technically paid in equity, the company isn’t worth anything (it’s making enough to cover maintenance costs at the moment) so I’m definitely just doing this for fun rather than for financial reasons. It’s just really satisfying being able to directly interact with our users, hear their bug reports and feature suggestions, and get to work on building a book tracking app that I personally use.
Of course I also have a regular paid job which is much more of a corporate enterprise software type of thing. If you’re wondering how I even have time to work on Hardcover and this blog, I do do a 4 day work week and so I always have Fridays off which gives me the freedom to do these sort of side projects.
Since I was an early adopter and now team member of Hardcover, I seem to naturally be picking up new followers since my account gets recommended in the list of users to follow. I also have a blog post on using Hardcover’s API and I get a small amount of followers through that as well. I now have 212 followers.
In 2025, I spent 283 hours working on Hardcover. Along with a lot of bug fixes, one of the main things I shipped was their new home page which we are calling the Dashboard. We’ve gotten good feedback from our users who are quite happy with it so that makes me really glad! Another thing I shipped right around Christmas is a barcode scanner. Other apps like Goodreads already provide this functionality (I would often use it while browsing at bookshops to check out a book’s reviews) so I’m glad I now have it in Hardcover as well.
3 things that went well
Taking a look back at my previous “year in review” posts, I kept them quite focused on my blog without too much in the way of personal updates. At times I do wonder, what’s a good line to draw in terms of what you do and don’t share on the internet? I do read some people’s blogs who go quite into details on their personal lives, and I do find it super interesting to read (I’m nosy like that).
Writing personal posts feels weird to me though because imagine if you had something personal to say - you wouldn’t just go up to 100 strangers (and/or friends and coworkers) and tell them that, would you? But that’s essentially what you are doing on a blog, you just don’t realise you’re doing it.
But anyway, I thought I’d re-introduce this “3 things” section here that I did back in 2020 with 3 personal things:
1. I got married
Eagle-eyed readers may notice I quietly sneaked into my Mt Takao post that I referred to my partner for the first time as “my husband”. It was very low-key - we just went down to the local ward office and signed some papers and then we were husband and wife. Although it might not be very romantic, the idea of having people stare at me as I wear a dress sounds like my worst nightmare so we decided to skip all of that.
We were quite late to buying our wedding rings, and since we got them custom-ordered we have to wait until mid-January until we actually receive them so it doesn’t quite feel like we’re “married married” yet.
2. Continuing to hike the hyakumeizan
I’ve now hiked 66/100 of the hyakumeizan, a list of some of Japan’s most famous mountains. For someone that used to hate the outdoors and physical exercise, the fact that I do hikes on the regular and can even do solo overnight hikes to places like Mt Kita, complete with long 3 - 4 hour drives to trailheads, and sleeping in my car (I couldn’t even drive 5 years ago) feels like a pretty big deal. I think the Emma from 5 years ago would be completely surprised at the person I’ve become now and I’m so curious to see what the Emma 5 years in the future will be doing.
3. I can cook now
So this is a pretty dumb one that I’m embarrassed to admit - I’m 30 and cooking is an adult skill that probably should be learned earlier in life than this. But in my 20s I basically lived off stuff that required little to no effort in cooking. And when I moved to Japan I discovered the wonders of convenience store meals and delicious cheap sushi so I didn’t really feel the need to cook much here either.
My husband on the other hand would cook all of his meals, and so when we first moved in together and split up the chores it naturally fell on him to continue that habit. Over time he got sick of doing all of it (fair enough) so now I take on most of the weekday dinners (since he finishes work later than me) while I leave the weekends to him. This year has mainly been a rotation of keema curry, oyako-don, salmon pasta, gyu-don and mabo tofu. My local supermarket does really good sushi so I’ll fall back on that when I don’t feel like cooking as well.
Basically I’ve just been trying to figure out recipes that are fairly idiot-proof, don’t take too long, and best-case scenario can be made as multiple batches so on some days all I have to do is microwave something that I made previously.
2 things that didn’t go well
My three main goals for 2025 were centred around my blog, learning Mandarin, and exercise. On the blogging front, I had a rather ludicrous goal of publishing 78 posts in 2025 (why, Emma) and I actually ended up in that range if you count photos and notes as posts. My other two goals didn’t go as well.
1. Learning Mandarin
I started off strong on this one by picking up Pimsleur. It started to derail in April (judging by my newsletter), and then I never really got back into the habit of it. I suppose this is mostly a self-discipline problem, where I don’t always feel like doing some language learning after work. Totally happy to spend my time working on this blog and Hardcover, though…
2. Consistent exercise
My aim was to start up a consistent gym and running habit and improve upon my numbers from 2024. My stats were:
- Gym: 127 times in 2024 -> 80 times in 2025
- Running: 240km in 2024 -> 288km in 2025
The gym habit was derailed when I twinged my back in early May by trying to pick up something heavy, and at times it still feels a bit “eh” so I’ve not been going to the gym as much.
As for why I didn’t do more running - I just tend to put it off throughout the day telling myself I’ll do it “later” and before I know it, I need to cook dinner, or it’s cold and I don’t want to go.
To be fair, I also hiked 344km in 2025 so I’m probably being a bit hard on myself. I almost don’t count it though since hiking is just like a fun hobby to me (while the gym and running are a bit more like me needing to eat my veggies).
Failing at goals and what I can do about it
I’ve set goals without reaching them to some extent for probably half of my life now and it ultimately comes down to a motivation and/or self-discipline problem. I might be “on-track” with my goals for the first couple of months, as the new year vibes give me that extra momentum boost and energy to stick to a routine or set of habits. But it only takes a travel trip or a week where things are busier than usual for that routine to crumble, and then I spend the rest of the year telling myself I’ll get back into the routine “soon” but never really do.
In writing this blog post I tried to reflect a bit on what I can change next year so that things go better. I think I need to switch from setting goals to choosing a “yearly theme” (which I’ll write about in a future post), since goals can be a bit of a futile effort. I still think 2025 still worked out pretty well overall, even if I had some failures so I’m not really beating myself up about it.
My plans for 2026
The blog
My blog has been an on-and-off constant in my life for the past 6 years, and so my main focus for 2026 is to maintain it as a constant, and to continue to share a varied amount of content on this blog, including via the notes section. I don’t want to box myself into being just running a programming blog or a hiking blog. One of my recent posts that I quite liked is my Shibuya to Harajuku post. It’s sort of this mix between being informative and personal (since it’s describing a half-day out I spent with my husband) and that’s generally the tone I try and strive for with my hiking blog posts as well.
One blog side project idea that has been floating about is adding GPS coordinates to some of my notes and posts and then I can pop them all on a map for people to peruse. I also want to blog more about coffee.
In terms of page views on this blog - one day I’d love to have my blog get a million views a year. It’s maybe a bit of a lofty goal, but if I’m a fifth of the way there now, then maybe it’s not an impossible goal to hit? Like I mentioned in last year’s post, page view goals are a bit arbitrary since whether I get 10,000 or 100,000 or a million, I’m not making any money from it so it’s just numbers at the end of the day to make my ego feel better. Unless some sort of opportunity comes along thanks to the blog, maybe.
Hardcover
Of course, now that I’m working on Hardcover, I will also be continuing to set aside some time for that. We’re planning on doing some more work on the Dashboard homepage, and I have a couple of other small feature ideas I have my eye on. We’re currently at 59,000 total users as of me writing this post. I think with a couple more big features released, and a bit more awareness of its existence (it’s still a bit of a niche one among the other book-tracking apps out there) it could really take off.
Other plans
Outside of the blog, I expect that my progress on the hyakumeizan will slow down a fair bit, as the remaining mountains are mostly harder ones (I’m sure the last 20% of the mountains are going to take 80% of the time). I was quite focused on the idea of completing the whole thing within 5 years, but I’m finding myself slowing down the pace now, and I think that’s okay too - I’m realising it’s better to diversify my hobbies and life rather than intensely focusing on just the one thing. I still also want to continue to focus on exercising and Mandarin for 2026 as well.
The other big life change I am expecting to make in 2026 is to adopt a dog! I’m starting to browse some of the dogs listed on various adoption/shelter sites here in Japan, although I think the easiest thing to do will be to drive to a shelter and say hello to some doggos. Taking that step feels a bit scary since I know that it’s going to change my life in a big way, but my last dog Aka passed away over 4 years ago now (RIP to the very best good boi), so I think it’s about time. I’m hoping by writing this down here on this blog, that will give me the extra push to actually go out and do it.
And that’s it for 2025 - hope you all have a wonderful 2026!