2012 Blog Retrospective

Time again to look back at how the blog has done over the past year. There are only a few differences compared to last year:

1. Clerics Without Spells - 1513 pageviews
2. Hard - 638 pageviews
3. One-Roll Populated Areas - 307 pageviews
4. D&D vs. Mainstream Fantasy - 248 pageviews
5. A Clone in Your Head - 240 pageviews
6. Thrown Crossbow Bolts - 217 pageviews
7. Whose Stuff Is It, Anyways? - 207 pageviews
8. Impromptu Towns - 199 pageviews
9. Wandering Modules - 173 pageviews
10. How's the Weather? - 171 pageviews

"Clerics Without Spells" is still dominating, especially since I continued that theme and started to develop a custom class system that used the revamped cleric and the other three classes in a huge number of combinations.

I'm not sure how "Hard" lost one pageview from its total. The One-Roll Populated Areas was a continuation of ideas in Impromptu Towns from last year, and I would consider it one of the highlights of this year, although it's still rough and needs polishing before it becomes worthy of a stand-alone download. The "D&D vs. Mainstream Fantasy" post and the "Whose Stuff Is It, Anyways?" post were both part of my new commitment to more arrogance in the blog. "Thrown Crossbow Bolts" was mostly about using objects as impromptu weapons in ways they weren't designed for; it seems kind of odd that it did so well, but I think that, too, was due to controversy rather than quality.

Again, Google Analytics tells a slightly different story. I can understand how some counts may be lower because they were posted before I started using Analytics, but I'm not sure why some posts with high pageviews on Analytics don't show up in Blogger's stats panel, or have lower stats. "One-Roll Populated Areas", for example, has 360 unique pageviews; The 20-Sided Quickies post has 222 unique pageviews, and the dice tool itself (v. 2.0) has 159 unique view, more than Analytics lists for the mainstream fantasy post.

Keyword searches were about the same as last year, with lots of searches for my blog name and some for "clerics without spells" and "liber zero". The surprising new search phrase is "the post about". There's only a few hits from that term, but still: why would anyone search for that phrase?

As for my "New Year's Blog Resolutions", I waited pretty much the entire year before I got a peek at Delving Deeper, so Liber Zero remained on hold. I did do a couple "hub" pages for a modular megadungeon, but I should really re-boot that project, especially since I'm getting more re-directs lately from Dyson's map pages, which tells me people are looking for maps. I did do more monsters, including a bunch of mites, but I didn't do any more of the "vice squad" monsters, which is something I specifically mentioned. I barely scratched the surface on blog reorganization and cleanup.

I'll have a post next week about future plans.