Six Years of Blogging

This past Sunday, the 11th of February, marked my sixth year blogging here at Daddy Rolled a 1. As per the tradition of my most of my years blogging, I missed the actual anniversary, although this year I did remember it on the day, but just didn't have a chance to get to my computer to write about it.

Year after year, I blog a little less - last year I only averaged about one post a month, which is much less than I'd really like. Much of this has to do with a combination of increased workload (which is a good thing, given that I own boutique ad agency that I started myself, so having "too much work" really means "you have some job security") and also some lingering effects from my daughter's accident that I wrote about in the autumn of 2015. I've just not felt much like blogging because I feel like I'd like to spend my free time with my daughter playing games or reading to her, and then when I'm not doing that, we've had to deal with multiple medical and legal appointments for her, and the rest of the repercussions from her accident have honestly just been emotionally draining on my family and me, so blogging tends to take a back seat.

I hope for that to change this year, as I still have a long list of topics I want to blog about (many of them still on the list  made for myself when I first started my blog), and I have slowly but surely been continuing to work on a project that I eventually intend to publish, and I've been thinking about maps and art styles that that. I'd say it's about 50% written at this point.

Unlike the last two years, I don't have a "Top 10 Things from the Past Year" list, nor a "Things I'm Looking Forward to Next Year" type of list, but I can recap a few of my posts from last year before I get to the stats.

I actually started off last year pretty strong, with two posts in January, including the first of a new "series" I started wherein I review forgotten, under-the-radar D20 books (starting with From Stone to Steel) and talk about how you can apply them to modern systems like Pathfinder (easy!), D&D 5th Edition (relatively easy), or stuff like Savage Worlds (not as difficult as you might think).

My biggest month of blogging was in February, when I wrote another D20 post about The Book of the Righteous and also a sort-of "accompanying" post for my "Victorian Era Mondays" series in which I reviewed the D20 version of Masque of the Red Death. I also blogged about my first participation in a LARP and previewed that I had been honored with being selected as a Judge again for the One Page Dungeon Contest.

Things slowed down in March, when I blogged only twice, once about a half-history/half-biography about the Comics Industry by writer Grant Morrison, and also reviewed one of my favorite comic series, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (again, the comic, not the movie).

I didn't blog again until June, when I posted some comics reviews including the new DC Universe Rebirth Special, which rebooted their universe. My next post wasn't until August, when I blogged about one of my favorite drawing books (or really, just favorite book, period) from childhood, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. And that was it for the year, unfortunately.

Here at the Stats

• 5,512 Page Views. This is down from the 8,235 I had last year.
• 1.43 Pages/Session (last year: 1.53 Pages/Session, down 6.07%)
• Average session duration 1:26 (last year 1:44; down 17.79%)
• 81.19% Bounce Rate (last year 79.55%, down about 2%)
• 79.73% of visitors were "new" instead of returning (70.85% last year, so this is an increase of 12.53%)
• 81.21% of the readers are from English-US readers (last year, 83.96%)

My goal this year will be to blog more and increase those stats above.

Over the past month, eight of the Top 10 posts are older posts on the site (some dating back to the year I started blogging in 2011), and one of the perennial top posts is actually a page on the site, "Currently Reading" which is funny because I haven't updated that in years. 

I look forward to hearing from you all, particular with topics you'd like me to cover (or to resurrect). Leave me a comment below, or message me on Google Plus, Facebook, or Twitter (links are all to the right-hand side).

Cheers, everyone!

• Hanging: A conference room in West Los Angeles for a mediator (related to my daughter accident) on my laptop
• Listening: Nothing right now
• Drinking: "Talking Rain" sparkling water