Seven Years of Blogging

Today marks the seventh anniversary of the start of my blog, way back in 2011. As a way to "celebrate" today, I got my gang together to play my long-running World of Samoth game, including my friend from Vancouver who has been playing in the game almost since the very beginning (we started in May 2001 and he joined maybe a year or two later), so it was nice to have him here. I'll recap the session in another post.

I'd been reading "old school" blogs for about two years before I began my own blog. It all started late one night, when I was up in the middle of the night because my infant daughter had woken up to be fed and changed, and I couldn't get back to sleep so I went down the dark hole of the Internet and stumbled across a blog talking about Gygax's use of language, which I found interesting, and from there I discovered dozens of blogs discussing older versions of the game. After around two years of reading, I finally started my own blog.

As I've discussed before in my past "anniversary" posts, I don't blog nearly as much as I'd like, and sadly every year has seen me post fewer times than the year before. I always have intentions to blog more, but my only time for blogging is typically at the tail end of the work day, after I've picked my daughter up from school, shuffled her around to her activities, finished work, helped with homework, made dinner, and cleaned the dishes. After that, if I sit in front the computer to write, I usually end up falling asleep. I can't even remember the number of times that I've woken up hours later, with the lights on, sitting in my chair with the beginnings of a blog post not even a quarter finished.

With that said, this year I did made a New Year's resolution to blog more - ideally once a week, which obviously hasn't happened, but I do have a couple of new posts since the first of the year. Over the past year since my last anniversary, I only made six blog posts: One in April 2017 wherein I updated my list of the books I was currently reading, a July post updating what I was currently watching at the time, two more July posts about the human cultures from my World of Samoth Game, and then a review and memories of the Horseclans series by Robert Adams. After July, I didn't post again until last month, in January 2018, during which I wrote a post about two examples of why I read comic books (which was one of my most favorite recent posts, but didn't really generate a lot of commentary as I was hoping), and a new entry in my on-going "Game Store Memories" series, this one about Brookhurst Hobbies in Orange County, California.

Here are the Stats (Feb 11 2017 to Feb 10 2018 versus Feb 11 2016 to Feb 10 2017:

• Page Views: 5,445 versus 5,564, down 2.14%
• Although this was down from the year prior, it was a much lower drop than from the previous year; while my overall pageviews are down a lot from what they used to be, it's at least relatively steady year to year now
• Unique Page Views: 4,856 versus 4,999, down 2.86%
• Average Pages Per Session: 1.28 versus 1.24, an increase of 3.1%
• Average Time on Page: 2:21 versus 3:18, down 29.04%
• I think part of this might be because I tend to write longer posts and my guess is that  lot of people don't read them to completion, mainly because they aren't as easy to read on a smartphone due to the small screen size
• Bounce Rate: 81.78% versus 81.10%, so a slight increase of 0.84%
• New Users Percent: 92.5% versus 91.3% are "new"
• New Users Total: 2,758 versus 3,075, a decrease of 10.31%
• This is clearly due to a lack of posts from me in the second half of the year
• Location: 71% of my readers from from the U.S., 5% from Canada, 4.4% from the UK, 2.2% Australia, 1.4% from Spain, 1.2% France, and 1% each from Germany and Japan.  
• Device: 64% view on desktop, which is down 21% from the previous year, and 29% view on a mobile device, up 24% from the previous year. Only 7% view on tablet, down 3% from the year prior. 

The most popular pages, in terms of page views, over the past year are almost all "legacy" posts (meaning, they weren't new posts in the past year), including Fun with Any Edition: AD&D 2nd Edition, the Evolution of D&D Snacks, Character Classes: The Noble, a review of the old Gamma World Module GW2: Famine in Fargo, and part of my Game Store Memories series, about the Compleat Strategist in New York. 

I'll be posting a bit more about my World of Samoth campaign this year, as well as adding some more comics-related posts, discussions of using older products in different versions of the game, and the occasional book, movie, or TV show review. I look forward to your comments and suggestions of what you'd like to see more of on the blog, and as always, thanks for reading! I can't believe when I started doing this, my daughter was only a year and a half old, and now she's halfway through 3rd Grade. The players in the game I run are now 19th level, and I've run two "old-school" games (old AD&D Modules S3 and S4), and played in a variety of other RPGs including Call of Cthulhu, Torg, Star Trek, Warhammer 40k, and Pathfinder fantasy. I participated in my first LARP, and started more frequently visiting game conventions to play both board games and RPGs. It's been a great seven years. 

Cheers!

Hanging: Home office, new laptop

Listening: "Virgo," by Wayne Shorter, 2004 Remaster

Drinking: We had a Luponic Distortion Series 008 IPA during our game session today