My goals as stated in the beginning were simple. I wanted to record my thoughts on games, movies, and whatever random topics caught my fancy, with the primary intended audience being myself. I also set an internal goal of posting at least once a week.
Well, let's look at some stats. I've made 78 posts this year. 60% of those have been video game related and 15% have been movie related. Over the whole year there has been an average of 1.5 posts a week (although clearly June through November I under delivered due to work craziness). It was never my plan to obtain readership, but over the year 938 unique people visited this blog, 393 of which returned at least once. Unfortunately these stats don't include hits on my feed, which is how a lot of people (myself included) read blogs, so I can't really paint a full picture of regular readership.
So, how do I feel about all this? Well, I'm happy, because I'm still here. I've actually persevered and kept this up for a whole year. I'm proud of that. There's a larger percentage of gaming posts than I would like, although in my opinion that's more due to an under-posting of other topics than over-posting on gaming. For me games are easy to write about, because they are generally long enough to elicit lots of interesting thoughts. They are also something I'm very knowledgeable about. In contrast, movies are much shorter and I don't always come out of them with some revelation. I have no problem producing a star rating, but coming up with something to say about every movie that doesn't sound like a book report is difficult.
I'm definitely disappointed in myself for not delivering over the summer and early fall. I should have made more time for myself. But I think I've found my groove again. And I've definitely decided that this is something I enjoy doing and will continue doing.
It's been interesting watching the blog's traffic. You can definitely see my slump in the graph (Unique visitors per week):
(This graph and all my stats come via a lovely tool called Stat Counter)The top ten posts most hit directly (doesn't count main page readers or feed hits):
- Final Fantasy III (DS)
- IGN Posted List of Top 25 Gamecube Games
- Guitar Hero III - Legends of Rock (Xbox360)
- Guitar Hero II (Xbox360)
- Electric Vehicle Limitations
- Nintendo DS M-06 Guitar Simulator
- Wiimote + Halo = Hot
- Ranting Against RMT
- That Was Easy
- Zombie Gaming
Top ten search terms that landed people here:
- top 25 gamecube games
- glein
- chris glein
- chris glein's blog
- ff3 ds strategies
- superman sucks
- defend barricade from zombies
- vehicle limitations
- does the ps3 have gamertags
- top 25 gamecube titles
- lf1m
- wow online profiles
I've got all this nifty data, but it doesn't tell me what I really want to know: What do you think? What was your favorite post? What would you like to see more of? What would you like to see less of? How do you feel about the style (tone, post length, etc.)? If you respond to any post on this blog, respond to this one. I started this blog for myself, but it's grown into more than that, and I care about what you guys think.
That said, I look forward to another year of blogging. Thanks for reading.
I'd like to encourage you to post snippets and examples of Media Center Markup Language (MCML). Most of what I've personally learned about MCML has come from reading your awesome and challenging markup. I imagine you'd pick up at least 3 other readers, and probably many more.
ReplyDeleteLove the gaming stuff too -- I live vicariously through your gaming.