Once again, with 2012 now officially in the books, it’s time for me to do my standard end-of-the-year statistical overview post. I tend to do these twice a year; once on New Year’s Day, and once on June 6th, which is the anniversary of when this Blog was started. I’ll dispense with the usual complaint about the lack of flying cars (I figure someone will get sick of waiting and get around to inventing one eventually) and just move on to the stats: All in all, traffic on the Blog was down just slightly from last year, but has shown a reasonably significant upswing in the past couple of months, owing to a couple of specific posts that have started getting more attention. On the plus side, a couple of weeks ago my Blog did receive its 250,000th page view, which puts me on a pace to reach a million visitors sometime around… oh, 2027 or so. Ultimately I’d like to get traffic moving back in a forward direction again (although I suspect I’ve got a while to go to get back up to the levels I was getting in 2009 and 2010.) Then again since I’ve long ago decided to keep this site as more of a hobby than anything, I suppose I will just try to keep producing interesting content, and see what happens from there. I’ve been meaning to try to write more fiction here (I recall that last year I set a goal of writing a new short story here each month, I think I managed about three during the year.) but it’s become pretty clear from the stats that the posts that get the most attention here are the ones that cover something that really hasn’t been covered well anywhere else on the Internet that people might be interested in.
In particular, while looking through my Blog stats, I’ve noted an interesting pattern that has formed on my Whitman’s Sampler post: For the past several years since I posted this, there has been a fairly decent spike in traffic on this post during the Holiday season leading up to Christmas, followed by a really big (but much shorter) one at Valentine’s Day. This particular post has become by far the most popular post on the Blog, although I have seen a couple of other posts (that didn’t quite get enough hits to make the top ten) that have started getting a lot more attention as of late as well. It would be nice if some of the posts that I enjoy writing (in particular, the various holiday kitsch roundups are a favorite of mine) were the ones that got more attention, but if I can manage to get 2 or 3 of these niche posts out a year I think I can get my traffic up by a decent amount. One shorter term step that I can take that I think would help would be to put together something of an index page of some of the more interesting posts on the site, making it easier to find some of it. It’s been on my list for a while to do this, but maybe if I say I’m actually going to do it then I’ll actually do it.
Anyway, once again I would like to thank those of you who have been reading this Blog for years, as well as those of you who might just be dropping in. I may occasionally have trouble coming up with content for the Blog, but I do remain committed to keeping it fresh and interesting to the extent that I am able to, and appreciate knowing that someone out there is actually reading the stuff I write every once in a while.
- Total Posts(all time, including this one): 586
- Total Posts (2011): 52
- Total Comments (all time): 885
- Total Page Views (all time): 253,898
- Total Page Views in 2012: 42.260
- Total Page Views in 2011: 42, 742
- Total Page Views in 2010: 52,228
- Total Page Views in 2009: 60, 939
- Total Page Views in 2008: 50, 219
- Average Visitors Per Day (2012): 115
Top posts in 2012:
Top posts (all time):
The Sledgehammer - Version 2.0 
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