Posting Miscellanea

Welcome to ND, yours truly at right, 2011

I write this blog mainly for myself, because I enjoy doing so. I treat it primarily as a journal of sorts, although I know that it is read at least semi-routinely by a small circle of family and friends. At the end of every year I go to the "Blog2print" site and order the hardback book version of the year's entries, and it has already proven fun to go back to 2009, 2010, etc, and see what I wrote then (complete with family pictures). So in that sense it serves as somewhat of a modern day scrap book or photo album.

While I write only when and if I want, I do know that via the vagaries of Internet search pages etc, various random people will stumble on something here. And since beginning in the Fall of 2009, I have a whopping total of 10 followers (thanks Brother Dave, or it would be 9...).

Every now and then, I take a peek at the Statistics page, and find it curious as to which posts of mine over the years continue to get traffic from various search sites and other referring pages. In a little over 4 years, I have accumulated a total of 38,286 page views, or about 725 views per month (I'm about 53 months in, and my day job is numbers, so I am going to be approximate - I don't count well after hours...). In recent times, having gotten back into the habit of posting somewhat regularly and therefore getting more traffic, I have been averaging perhaps 1,200-1,300 hits per month. For real blogs this is peanuts, but it still seems like a decent number of random occurrences to me.

Riders of Rohan

Top 10 posts of all time, by page views as of today, are:

1. 901 hits - Painting a Rider of Rohan. In any week/month/year this almost invariably comes up #1, so I must have done something to rank fairly high on search pages purely by accident. A detailed post with pics that I think is a good one for what it is. Real hobby content - how I painted a specific type of figure in step by step format, with pictures.
2. 570 hits - Elk Neck State Park hiking plans. A simple post on plans to hike this Maryland state park on the upper Chesapeake Bay back in October of 2010. People that get to this post probably think "that's not what I was looking for", and yet it remains my second highest ranked post. The two-part follow up posts on the actual day of hiking rank #5 and #9. Three of the top 10; go figure...
3. 547 hits - Historicon 2010, Duke Siefried's display games - Some nice pictures of display games put on by one of the pioneers of the hobby, and a guy well known for "over the top" games. Not a bad post, with pictures, and people getting to this one almost certainly got here for a reason and found what they were looking for, at least in some regard.
4. 541 hits - Landsknechts. A simple post of a few mediocre quality pictures of some nice miniatures. OK for what it is, but most likely not what people would be looking for.
5. 404 hits - Elk Neck State Park, part 1. First part of a two part post on my day hiking and geocaching this state park. Probably of some interest to those who stumbled onto it.
6. 365 hits - LaSalle miniatures rules, first playing impressions. Probably of interest to those miniatures gamers who specifically searched for this.
7. 286 hits - Book review, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. This is interesting to me, as I have posted about 50 book reviews on modern literature books I have read over the past few years, and this is the one (a very very good book, I might add) that consistently gets hits on searches. 
8. 252 hits - Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, 2010. A simple post with decent pictures on our family visit to this local attraction in Ridley Creek State Park. A good post for those searching for this.
9. 200 hits - Elk Neck State Park, part 2. The second and final part of #5 above, which itself was a follow-on to #2.
10. 180 hits - "The Holy Grail, sort of"... A post on my impulse purchase of an Epiphone ES-335 Pro, a copy of my Holy Grail guitar, the Gibson ES-335. An innocuous post for what it is, but almost certainly not what someone searching for "the Holy Grail" would expect to find. Cup of Christ. Wanna-be guitar. Not exactly the same thing.

So what's the point? I'm not sure. Hence "posting miscellanea".

Grace, age 6, at right

But it is amusing to me that the posts that I find somewhat innocuous gets lots of hits, and the posts about family and the stuff that means the most to me gets little if any traffic at all. Which is to be expected. But amusing nonetheless.