Monday, July 02, 2012

State of the Blog 2012

It's been another year so it's time for another review. 2012 was a leap year so there were 366 days from last July until the end of this June. There were 362 posts on this blog, 3 on the SNES blog, and 1 on the Star Trek blog. 1 post per day, every day, for the entire year. Woo! I didn't really solve my problem from last year about finding a way to combine all the posts into one super-blog of sorts. Instead I decided I didn't care. I found a Facebook app which gathers RSS feeds from multiple places and posts them automatically and decided that was good enough. It seems Google has since integrated Blogger into G+ so they're all getting sent there as well.

In the last year there have been 354 comments. Down a little from the 1 per average of last year but still pretty close. I don't believe I had to overrule Google's automated spam filter a single time all year. All the nude celeb links and SEO optimizers ended up in the spam folder never to be seen by anyone. All the real posts made it to the blog in real time. I'm pretty happy with the filter and see no reason to turn on any bot catching passwords or the like for the time being.

Interestingly, to me at least, random people I don't know started posting comments. Mostly in the Galaxy Legion posts but there have been a few elsewhere. Woo! For the most part it's still just people I know who are following along but it's good to know that some other people have stumbled their way here. Most of my posts seem to get in the 10-20 hit range. The Galaxy Legion stuff was getting a couple hundred each. Of course, I was also seeing big traffic spikes from automated crawlers while I was posting about GL so maybe it wasn't real people making it at all. Alas, I stopped playing that game so those posts aren't happening anymore.

The top search results are exclusively from World of Warcraft and Galaxy Legion. The top 6 are still variations on archaeology. I think the stats are starting to fail me here since my options are last month or all-time. My top viewed post remains the archaeology post but it only has 3866 page views. Last year it had 3627 so it's really only picked up 239 hits in the last year. That said, my 7th most viewed post only has 181 hits, so a gain of 239 would almost certainly still make it very high for the year. Snidely seems to have fallen out of interest. (Hey Google! Modify the Blogger stats to show stuff from the last year, will you!)

What games were tagged in posts this year?

video - Final Fantasy II, X-Com, Galaxy Legion, League of Legends, Zelda (Ocarina of Time), Dead Rising 2, Final Fantasy Legend, NHL 12, Dynasty Hockey, Guitar Hero, Mystic Warlords of Ka'a, Glitch, City of Villains, Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy Legend II, Zork, Romance of the Three Kingdoms III, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy Adventure, Final Fantasy IV, Star Wars: The Old Republic, StarCraft II, Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, Civilization V, Torchlight, Band Hero, Final Fantasy I, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy Legend III, Virtual Villagers, Diablo III, Minish Cap, TSN Predictor, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Final Fantasy V, F-Zero, Gradius III, Pilotwings

board - Through The Ages, Le Havre, Queen's Gambit, Can't Stop, Football Strategy, Innovation, Paydirt, Vegas Showdown, Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation, Sudoku Moyo, King of Tokyo, crayon rails, Agricola, Kingdom Builder, Puerto Rico, Roll Through The Ages, A Few Acres of Snow, backgammon, Campaign Manager 2008, Red November, Dungeon Lords, Ricochet Robots, Liar's Dice, Hacienda

other - Magic the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Werewolf, Final Fantasy Trading Card Game

That's quite a few games!


I once again re-read the posts from the last year. I actually skipped most of the Galaxy Legion posts since they were mostly crunching numbers I no longer care about. I cared about them at the time so I'm definitely happy that they exist but I don't really care to read them again. A lot of the anecdote type posts were nice to read again.

It did seem like some of the more commented posts were Magic drafts. I should get back into playing Magic Online again to get a few more such posts up. I also vaguely recall hearing there's going to be a GP in Toronto later this year? I should practice for that!

All told I'm pretty happy with the way things are going. I think the change to posting on SNES and Star Trek blogs on the weekend will be a positive one. The Final Fantasy Marathon continues to churn along at a reasonable rate.

4 comments:

Matt V said...

I comment directly to you some times now, so your numbers are down.

The Toronto GP is Modern (everything from 8th edition onwards), not the best format to dabble in. M13 is coming out in a few weeks, and then Return to Ravnica, which was a gold set and very popular.

*I* would like you to start playing Magic Online again...

Caspur said...

There is a new trend you should be aware of in magic online. People stream their drafts live on twitch. This means that sometimes you are randomly playing against 100-1000 people piloting one draft.

I counter this cheating by checking in on twitch when I play and seeing if someone in my draft is streaming. If they get the advice of hundreds of people at least I can see their hand too :)

Old_Hobo said...

I would actually expect having 100-1000 people all piloting the same draft to be more of a hindrance than a benefit. I mean, maybe someone will have a gem of insight but it seems like the signal would be lost in the noise.

Ziggyny said...

Indeed. One person can certainly help a lot. But I found personally having more than one person watching and 'helping' was detrimental. Mostly to my clock as I'd have to explain my plays again and again but also to my sanity. I don't know how you'd possibly parse through hundreds of opinions. Maybe you could build a good structure (one guy is playing, one guy is reading chat and passing along particularly insightful comments) but it seems like it would hurt.

It certainly hurts if your opponent can see your hand! I will have to watch out for that...