It is time for 19!

No, not that 19.  The blog turns 19 today.  Ever WP.com admits I have been around that long.

The annual WP.com greeting

And 19 years is kind of a long time, with nearly a third of my life involving me tapping out typo filled first drafts and pressing the publish button more than 7,500 times.  But we’ll get to the silly stats a bit further down the page.

And yet it feels a bit like a lesser turning of the years, just one shy of 20, a nice big round number that is so much more impressive than 19.  19 feels like it is almost there, while 20 has arrived.  Or so it goes with those of us who count in base 10 I suppose.

As part of Blaugust I reflected a bit on the writing process, as I am wont to do, but also considered the goals of the blog, what my writing assignment here is, was, and might end up being.  I say that because I certainly didn’t start out the way things are now.  It took a while to establish whatever we call what I am doing now.

If we go back to that very first post back in September of 2006, I seemed to want to write about games I had already played, to go over my history.  And I certainly did some of that.  I wrote about early online games like Stellar Emperor and Air Warrior and TorilMUD.  I tried to tease out memories of things like Starsiege: Tribes and the early days of EverQuest.

You can find more than a few posts about games I played before I started blogging.  But things quickly turned to talking about MMOs and what might come next.  We were in both the age of blogging and of MMORPG popularity.  We were going to have all sorts of MMOs, and they were going to be about anything and everything.  Even Micheal Jackson.

Planet Michael… only to be imaged, never to be seen

And then the WoW killer… because surely somebody would come along and dethrone the mighty king of MMORPGs… never appeared.  It captured and dominated the market and its peak was never eclipsed in the west and developers game up on that and started trying to cash in on the next trend, which was Facebook games or free to play MMOs or MOBAs or Kickstarted nostalgia farming name driven projects… all of which I covered some here and there.  Almost all of them failed to live up to their promise and most failed to survive for very long.

As part of that I started posting about events and launches and expansions and updates, if only just to establish a timeline so that I could remember what changed when.

Along the way I wrote about what I was playing.  At first those posts were haphazard, lacking in detail and mostly just “I did a thing” without much around it.  That developed as a style, focused around the instance group and our adventures in Azeroth, but also around EVE Online and the ongoing struggle to find the game in the sandbox.

That expanded to other games we played and got more detailed.  Likewise, once I found my niche in null sec, posts about the ups and downs of space empires in New Eden began to figure much more.

For no real reason beyond “it seemed like a good idea at the time” I wrote a Month in Review post at the end of that first September and have continued to do so every since.  While those posts feature quite a bit of fluff, the revisiting of what I wrote about a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, and so on… that became a cornerstone of my own experience with the blog, reminding me of the past and where I have been and what I have done online.

In the end, it turned out the blog turned out to be about games I had played, my gaming history and such.  I was just writing it as it went and it slowly became nearly two decades of history, and not all of it a complete waste.

There is a whole page or so in Empires of EVE: Vol II that reprints my observations on the battle at 6VDT-H.  My account, written the next day while the events of the battle were still fresh in my mind ended up being, ended up being able to provide some flavor of the battle in a book about the conflict of empires in which I was just one guy in a ship.

And I still get a nod now and then for having written up something that didn’t make the news or other outlets.  Recently I even got a nice message from Asher Elias, head of the Imperium, who is working on his own history of the game and null sec who said:

your site has been so helpful it’s hard to overstate the value

I feel pretty good about that.  The blog, in the end, became  something of what I intended, if not in exactly how I envisioned getting there.  Though, again, that might apply more to EVE Online that other titles due to the nature of the game.  The player driven nature of New Eden means that major events, battles and such, are one time unique events.  Meanwhile, in WoW for example, every Deadmines run faces the exact same set of challenges, so the tale of our group is hardly unique save for the fact that we were there for that particular moment.

What do I take from that?  Don’t hesitate to write down some event?  Maybe.  Different from where I started for sure.

And even these anniversary posts have evolved over time.  As I always say, look at all the work I put into some of those early posts.  They had themes!  Now… well, go back and look at some of the old ones if you want fancy.  Here they are:

That is the preliminaries.  Actually, I even gave you most of the reflections up front this time.  Not sure what I’ll have at the back end.  We shall see.

The Basic Stats

Days since launch: 6,940 (+376, because I had to calculate early last year)
Posts total: 7,572 (+400)
Total Words: 6,783,396
Average words per post: 895 (+58)
Post Likes: 25,294
Average posts per day: 1.091 (-0.001… I am slowing…  so very slowly)
Comments: 40068 (+1,089)
Average comments per post: 5.29 (-0.12)
Average comments per day: 5.77 (-0.25)
Comments written by me: 8,264 or 20.6%
Space used by images: 4.7 GB used, 9.1 GB (70.2%) upload space remaining.
Blog Subscribers: 3,523 (+975, mostly spammers)
US Presidents since launch: 4
British Monarchs since launch: 2
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 9

Summary: I write a lot of words still and we have a retread president.  Also, last year in my rush to get on a plane for our 25th wedding anniversary trip I totally didn’t update some of those numbers and I am too lazy to go re-figure the increment.  But nobody commented on my, for example, saying I had surpassed the word count for the Wheel of Time series of books when the number I was showing was clearly less than that.  But I am well past that now.

Data Unfiltered

So what is going on here at the blog? People still come to visit. Not as many as used to, but many more than I figured ever would. So let’s see what the numbers are, starting with page views.

Year 19 – Page views by month

If you add up the numbers along the right hand side it comes out to something like 6,863,443 page views over the life of the blog.  That is more than I ever expected, though probably less than somebody like Amazon gets over the course of a minute on any given day.

You can see the peaks and valleys of the site over the years.  The high point was 2012, as I have oft indicated.  Things really fell off after Covid, with 2021 and 2022 seeing the lowest numbers since the first year of the blog.  Then things have revived a bit.

Summed up by full year… so leaving out 2006 and 2025 so far… the trend looks like this.

TAGN Page View Traffic by Full Years – 2007 through 2024

2007 remains the full year with the lowest count, but 2022 wasn’t that far behind.

And then there is one more chart I usual toss in here. I usually just paste in an image of it, but I prefer actual numbers rather than pictures of numbers, so I am once again going to let WP format some data from Excel.

So that is either a nicely formatted chart with numbers or a bunch of mushed up garbage, likely the latter if you’re reading this on your phone.  Sorry about that.

As you can see, until this year the number of words per post had been mostly rising.  I don’t know what got into me in 2024, where I got close to 1,500 words per post, but this year I am down somewhat.

Part of the rise in words has to be my month in review posts, which get a chunk longer every five years.  But most of it is likely me taking care to fill in more details about things in posts as you never know what is going to end up being a critical or interesting tidbit of information years down the road.

Who Sends People Here?

Search engines.  Seriously, that is most of the traffic.  And Google is 98% of the search engine traffic.  He is how search engines shake out.

1. Google Search – 150,804
2. Android Google Quick Search Box – 21,508
3. Bing – 1,228
4. duckduckgo.com – 917
5. Baidu – 616
6. Yandex – 292
7. Yahoo Search – 148
8. search.brave.com – 91
9. ya.ru – 32
10. starsreach.com – 25
11. live.com – 4
12. AOL – 2
13. Google Image Search – 1

Google is on there three times… though Google Image Search isn’t the mighty referral engine it once was… because Google decided to just download all your images… excuse me, it cached them.

On the bright side, Bing recognizes me again.  It had de-indexed me for a stretch. On the flip side of that, does it matter?  Also, hello my two AOL users, because I doubt the same AOL user landed here twice.

Then there is social media and social media like sites… who no longer send me that much traffic anymore.

1. WordPress.com Reader – 2025
2. Reddit – 1,252
3. evebloggers.com – 787
4. Facebook – 373
5. Hacker News – 273
6. bsky.app – 102
7. X – 89
8. flipboard.com – 38
9. tumblr.com – 23
10. youtube.com – 20
11. inoreader.com – 16
12. bloggers.feedspot.com – 11
13. feedly.com – 11
14. l.threads.net – 8
15. blogroll.club – 5
16. newsblur.com – 5
17. Pinterest – 5
18. twitch.tv – 4

At one time social media was a lot better at sending traffic out.  But now sites like X go out of their way to keep people from leaving.  Not that I post anything to X in any case, I deleted my account there more than a year back.

New on the list, the AI sites are coming for us!

1. chatgpt.com – 205
2. perplexity.ai – 54
3. gemini.google.com – 43
4. copilot.microsoft.com – 4
5. chat.deepseek.com – 3

Not really a force to be reckoned with at this point, but some of those sites only recently started trying to show their work.

Then there are my fellow bloggers.  They do send me a bit of traffic, more than some social media sites I post to daily.  Here are the top ten blogs that send me traffic.

1. Parallel Context – 421
2. Inventory Full – 399
3. Blessing of Kings – 330
4. In An Age – 186
5. Werit’s Blog – 98
6. Going Commando – 61
7. The Nosy Gamer – 51
8. Priest with a Cause – 49
9. The Greybill – 44
10. I Has PC – 36

Eight of those ten are Blogger based blogs that use the dynamic blogroll sidebar widget.  Two of those eight aren’t even updated regularly, but still send me traffic due to that blogroll option.

The Greybill is a fellow WP.com blog and just linked to me about a couple of EVE Online things, which I appreciate.  And then there is I Has PC… or there isn’t I Has PC, as the site no longer responds.  But is sent me a bit of traffic right up until the very end.

More Frivolous Data

We’ll start once again with the top ten categories of posts here, and the change since last year. Out of 104 total categories, a number unchanged since last year, these are, were, and remain, the most used.

1. EVE Online – 2,403 (+118)
2. World of Warcraft – 1,773 (+42)
3. Null Sec – 949 (new to the list)
4. EverQuest II – 810 (+7)
5. EverQuest – 712 (+17)
6. Blizzard – 585 (+12)
7. Lord of the Rings Online – 549 (+61)
8. WoW Classic – 483 (+35)
9. Instance Group – 473 (+21)
10. CCP – 455 (+33)

Null Sec, which is a sub-category, made it on to the list this year.  Meanwhile, Sony Online Entertainment, a category that hasn’t been valid or used for the last decade, that finally fell off the top ten.

Then there are tags, which represent the land of chaos.  Tags I slap on a post at a whim, as a joke, as a futile attempt to signal tone or intention.  And sometimes I use tags for games I am not sure quite deserve a category yet.  No Man’s Sky is only a tag so far.  So there are 5,065 tags used on the blog, up 287 from last year.

For tags I feel like I have to do a top 20 just to get some scope.

1. Delve – 146
2. World War Bee – 130
3. Progression Server – 127
4. Asher Elias – 123
5. Meaningless Milestones – 121
6. Reavers – 101
7. MMO Expansions – 100
8. Imperium – 93
9. Wrath of the Lich King – 91
10. Rambling Detected – 88
11. Council of Stellar Management – 86
12. Cataclysm – 86
13. Fippy Darkpaw – 85
14. Nostalgia – 82
15. EVE Updates
16. Star Trek Online – 78 (converted to a tag this year)
17. Warlords of Draenor – 66
18. Free-To-Play – 64
19. Skill Points – 64
20. SuperData Research – 61

As always, the category often drives the tags used.  If I write more EVE Online posts than anything else, then there are more EVE Online related tags.

And, as I have done in the past, here are the tags I have used exactly 19 times over the last 19 years.  It turns out there are ten of them.

1. Deadmines
2. Mounts
3. Station Cash
4. Community
5. Trion Worlds
6. Pet Battles
7. Storm Legion
8. Blog Banter
9. Nintendo Switch
10. Google Bard

I actually know what all of those are related to.  Last year I had a couple of “uh?” items on the list.

What Do People Read Here?

Here are the Top 20 most viewed posts over the last 12 months here on the site:

1. The No Man’s Sky Worlds Part II Update Overwhelms Me – 14,115
2. The Blizzard WoW Classic 2025 Road Map includes Pandaria and New Vanilla Progression Servers – 7,776
3. Stuck on the Level 47 Requirements for Pokemon Go – 7,318
4. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends – 6,685
5. Threads is Dead – 5,314
6. Level 45 at Last in Pokemon Go – 4,371
7. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go – 4,148
8. EverQuest and the Coming Expanded Start Special Server – 3,783
9. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID! – 3,230
10. Level 48 Achieved and the Level 49 Task Requirements in Pokemon Go – 2,992
11. Binge Watching – The Lazarus Project – 2,986
12. My Music Listening was Wrecked by iTunes – 2,955
13. Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft – 2,896
14. Cat Catching in Enshrouded – 2,870
15. Dual Universe is Going Offline Tomorrow – 2,686
16. Level 47 Achieved and the Level 48 Requirements in Pokemon Go – 2,413
17. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor – 2,061
18. WoW Midnight Editions and Pricing Revealed with Early Access for Housing – 2,036
19. Enshrouded After the Dragon – 1,929
20. EVE Galaxy Conquest is Probably Not the 4X New Eden Game You were Hoping For – 1,823

That tells you what is popular, or at least what Google sends me.  I seem to be answering some Pokemon Go questions for people, with five posts on the list.

I am also interested to see how much No Man’s Sky traction I have gotten.  As a game I haven’t elevated it to its own category yet because I have only written 16 posts with the associated tag, and a couple of those are month in review summaries.

Maybe I should fix that.  I gave Elite Dangerous a category slot and only used it four times.  Certainly NMS has gotten more play time out of me.

Also, I seem to have hit a nerve with my iTunes post.  That was… last week, and it made the top 20 for the last 12 months?

Then there is the ALL TIME TOP 20 posts list.

1. Play On: Guild Name Generator – 66,146
2. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID! – 62,788
3. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit – 56,976
4. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online – 40,272
5. How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark – 36,259
6. First Pokemon Black and White Download Event – Victini – 33,324
7. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean – 30,333
8. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun – 26,001
9. April Fools at Blizzard – 2013 – 24,758
10. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk! – 24,644
11. Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access – 23,746
12. Diablo III vs. Torchlight II – A Matter of Details – 22,273
13. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go – 21,565
14. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II – 20,771
15. EVE Online – The Tutorial – 18,698
16. The Mighty Insta-90 Question – Which Class to Boost? – 18,697
17. Type 59 Being Pulled from the World of Tanks Store – 15,983
18. World of Warcraft Magazine – Issue 2 – 15,969
19. Level 85 in EverQuest… Now What? – 15,875
20. April Fools at Blizzard 2017 – Not Much to Talk About – 15,071

First of all, I doubt I will ever have another post pass the 50K page view mark.  The three that are up there are cemented by having been popular during the peak era of the blog.  The average number of page views for the top 500 posts, which is all WP.com will let me see, is 1,457.  The average for all 7,572 posts is probably double digits, even with Alamo and the Play On Guild Name Generator sitting above 60K.  There are a lot of posts with 5 page views.

There are also some classics in there.  The EVE Online tutorial post, which was the fourth post on the site, and the first one addressing a game I was actively playing… well, it was a different time.  No screen shots, just ire.  I have suggested that it was my desire to rant about that tutorial that finally drove me to start a blog.

Otherwise, that is a load of stuff that Google liked at one point or another.

The Inevitable Summing Up

Sometimes I arrive at this point in these annual posts and wonder aloud if I should take a break, not write so much, or change up what I write about.

But if you’ve read down this far you’re not falling for that.  I can’t even fool myself on that front anymore. Hell, last year I said I might not bother to do an annual review post, but here I am, Mister Unreliable Narrator.

No matter how tired I am at the end of the day, I somehow always have something I want to post about.  And it is even about video games most days!

My goal, which I ended up setting a year or two in when I decided to reign in chaos and maybe have a plan, was to have a post on every week day, leaving aside weekends for overflow or non-gaming topics of whatever.  I have somehow exceeded that plan… to the point that I have posted every day for the last 1,993 days in a row, or every day since March 29, 2020.

Maybe I could give up on that streak… though, again, just seven more days for a round number.

Really, though, I am wondering what I should do for the 20th next year.  Open to ideas.

Just 12 months to work that out.