State of the Blog

It's been a little over a year since I started posting again. At the time my goals were to try to be interesting to people I know now, people I used to know, and people I don't even know at all. Especially to future me. I didn't want to feel obligated to post every day because I worried that doing so would cause missing one day to throw everything off the rails. How have I done? What's worked, and what hasn't?

Well, in the last year I've made 311 posts. From the time I started using bridge hands to post every day I ended up with 300 posts in 319 days. Pretty much the entire missed section came from missing one day due to internet outage and then letting everything get thrown off the rails. So on the one hand, failure there. But on the other, I did come back on the rails eventually and made a pretty good run of it. Clearly I'm not going to change myself and screwing up will cost me. But I have managed to make posting a part of my daily routine which I'm going to call a win.

Before I came back I had a total of 2 comments. Since then I've had 313. 311 of which have been in the last year. So, exactly 1 comment per post on average. This excludes spam which Blogger has done a very good job of filtering out. 266 such spam has been caught. As far as where the comments have come from, almost exclusively from my current friends. A couple from my family. Strangers, not so much. So, I may have managed to become interesting to people I know, but not to people I don't. At least, not enough to convince them to post.

Blogger does track page hits to specific posts, though. Sadly, it only lets me track by day, week, month, or all-time. I'd like a year option, but for today at least the all-time option will work. My number one most viewed post is Archaeology Rare Items which is a list of drops from a World of Warcraft profession that I couldn't find anywhere else. Apparently quite a few other people couldn't find one either, as it's gotten 3627 hits. That number isn't actually very big all things considered but it does show some strangers have found their way here.

The next highest is 10-Man Heroic Chimaeron Timings which is my proudest post. It goes into specific detail about the mechanics of a World of Warcraft fight and explains why a specific strategy makes sense. I've looked in on the stats tab in Blogger every now and then and periodically I'll get a bunch of traffic from a guild's forums. Different guilds each time. Mostly they're private forums so I can't take a look on the discussion but one time it was public. It started as a debate on how to do the fight. Eventually someone linked my post, they tried it, and it worked. If I have one regret about quitting World of Warcraft it's that I can't make posts like this one now.

The third one surprised me a lot. Fan eXpo 2010 Costume. I can't actually explain this one. The 8th most frequent search term to find my blog is Snidely Whiplash so I have to assume those people ended up at my costume page and ended up disappointed with what they found.

The top ten is rounded out by a bunch of posts about earning realm firsts achievements in World of Warcraft, the second archaeology post, the Nintendo 3DS SD card post, a post about playfair ciphers, and by a very recent post about a Galaxy Legion item.

I mentioned search terms above. Along with Snidely is kronyn datacube (the Galaxy Legion item) and 8 different searches related to archaeology.

How about actual content? 131 of the last 300 posts were bridge hands. I had a couple complaints that people didn't find them very interesting. I also had some people who said they liked them, and they got a lot of comments. I recently re-read every post from the last year, except I skipped a lot of the bridge posts. Don't get me wrong, I liked doing them at the time and liked reading some of them recently. There were just too many of them. I think I may try to bring them back in a little easier to read format or maybe just more spread out.

Possibly the solution is to split off and make a sub-blog for bridge posts? There is a bit of a precedent here since I did make a sub-blog for Star Trek which fell apart when my computer died. I want to resurrect that, I want posting there to count as posting once per day, and I really don't think merging it into here makes any sense at all. Maybe there's a way to make a super-blog which would just compile posts from a bunch of different sub-blogs? This is something I need to look into...

Re-reading the last year of posts also brought to my attention some follow-up posts that just never got written.  Now at least I have a list of things that fell aside. I also expect to do some M12 drafts in a month or two to prepare for Nationals.

All in all I'm pretty happy with the way things have gone here in the last year. I should try find a way to grow and evolve the site, of course, but if I can just manage to keep up as the last year as gone then I'll be content.