The end of the year is a time of both reflection and anticipation—recognizing our successes (and failures) and imagining a yet-to-be-written future.

My wish for you is a Happy New Year filled with fierce curiosity, small joys, and good trouble. (My hopes for a calm, uneventful, and pleasantly dull 2026 are unlikely to materialize.)

I also offer a heartfelt thank you for reading JAG’s Workshop. While I love writing this “curated collection of eclectic ephemera” for my own pleasure, knowing you’re reading it gives me a jolt of exhilaration and makes the effort infinitely more worthwhile. I write to amuse, educate, challenge, and infuriate—and I enjoy hearing from you when I do.

2025 was my first full year writing on JAG’s Workshop. I entered the year with a theme of “Consistency.” In my head that meant “publish at least weekly”—matching my 2024 cadence—perhaps three or four times a week. Instead, I unexpectedly launched a daily publishing streak on January 14 that’s lasted 351 days. (I wrote a bit more about the streak in One Year Later.)

While I do hope to make it to 365 days, I’m actually not at all worried if I don’t. I won’t consciously choose not to publish something between now and then, but if circumstances don’t allow for it, that’s fine. As I noted in One Year Later, all streaks end. And new ones begin.

The best part about embarking on this streak is that I developed a habit of writing regularly—something I feel compelled to do each day. I get antsy if I don’t write something, no matter the length. It also forced a recalibration of what I considered “worthy” of publishing. Sometimes six or seven words are sufficient.

I no longer set New Year’s resolutions; I prefer yearly themes. The great thing about themes is they are broad and offer many ways of achieving success. I mentioned that my 2025 theme for the site was “Consistency”; had I published every week instead of every day, or even one long-form piece a month, I would have achieved my theme.

For 2026, my theme for JAG’s Workshop is “Impact.” Again, this provides several paths to success, from the obvious (more readers; more free and paid subscribers), to the less tangible (direct feedback from you; more pieces being quoted or reposted by others). Basically, writing that impels action.

This is also the time for End-of-Year “best of” lists, so I’ve crawled through my minimal analytics to find my most-visited posts. This is for my fellow data nerds 🤓.

Here is the top-visited post for each month:

• January: The Index, a New Independent Publication From Joan Westenberg
• February: Xcode Now Supports New Hardware Without Needing to Download the Entire App
• March: Some Thoughts on WWDC25
• April: US Government ‘Mistakenly’ Deports Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvadoran Megaprison, Claims Nothing Can Be Done to Get Him Back
• May: Clever Use of Apple Vision Pro for Running Home Cabling
• June: A Brief Musing on Lisa Melton’s Transcoding Tools and Ripping Discs in the Age of Streaming
• July: Malcolm-Jamal Warner Dies at 54
• August: Xcode Install Size
• September: Apple’s ‘Can’t Decide Guide’
• October: Help Find a Cure for Type 1 Diabetes (T1D)
• November: The Shocking Reason GM and Others Are Ditching CarPlay—Spoiler, It’s Money
• December: John Giannandrea Leaving Apple

And here are the top ten most-visited posts from this year:

1. The Shocking Reason GM and Others Are Ditching CarPlay—Spoiler, It’s Money (November; one of my very few “clickbait”-style headlines)
2. A Brief Musing on Lisa Melton’s Transcoding Tools and Ripping Discs in the Age of Streaming (June)
3. Help Find a Cure for Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) (October)
4. Xcode Now Supports New Hardware Without Needing to Download the Entire App (February)
5. A Bookmarklet for Creating Text Fragments (October)
6. John Giannandrea Leaving Apple (December)
7. Authoritarian Government Forces U.S. Companies To Remove Apps From Sale (October)
8. ChatGPT on Sam Altman’s Double Popped Collar Polo (April)
9. Some Thoughts on WWDC25 (March)
10. Trust Fail (October)

(Curiously, the most visited post this year isn’t from 2025; it’s my June 2024 piece, Fixing an Incorrect Apple ID Name in iOS Settings. No, I can’t explain it either.)

My most prolific months were April (52 posts), July (50), and November (49). My least prolific were January (35), February (38), and August (38). I’m surprised by the relatively low count for August, as that was Blaugust, for which I was “obligated” to post daily.

I post pretty consistently throughout the week, with a tiny bias toward posting more on Tuesdays, and a hair fewer posts on weekends.

There was a noticeable uptick in visitors between March and July, and another, larger one between August and December. The first seems organic. The second seems tied to my announcing the site on LinkedIn and Facebook. (I hate to admit it, but perhaps “telling people what you’re up to” (aka “marketing”) actually works.)

Finally, this year I’ve written 114,384 words—about 9,500 a month—equal to about 150 magazine columns, 1.5 nonfiction books, or the output of a top, high-cadence Substack author.

I’ll keep writing. I hope you’ll keep reading.

Happy New Year.