State of the Blog update 2023

 

Overview for the year…

I’ve posted less to the blog this year, mainly due to the end of the Curse of Strahd campaign. I also severely dropped off in the last quarter as work and life became busier. That said, the overall engagement and views on the blog are sharply up, with this year having 72.5% of the overall views I’ve had since I moved to Blogger some years ago.

Why the change?

1) Mastodon - my experience of Twitter was that it was like shouting (sometimes angrily) into the void. I’ve had much higher engagement on Mastodon, especially when I use the right hash tags (eg #ttrpg #vtt etc). I see less in the way of comments on the blog, but more in the way of responses to the shares when I toot them out. I suspect being on @dice.camp helps as well.

2) Charles Stross - when I read Season of Skulls and mentioned it in my monthly books post, Charlie boosted the toot. That drove a huge amount of traffic, with the end result that the post is the second most read overall and the most popular in 2023.

3) Reviews - I still do reviews of roleplaying books that I like, and often they’re either reasonably new, or somewhat more obscure OSR books, and just something that interests me. I don’t tend to review books I don’t like, partly because I don’t think that it’s nice to say bad things (I can get that entertainment on Bryce’s tenfootpole.org posts), but more because I don’t want to waste the time. I try and be objective and express how I feel. One of these posts will usually do between 100 to 150 views. Probably not stellar, but nice to know they get looked at.

Of course, the reason for the blog isn’t about the number of views, it’s just been a way of replacing the personal website that I have had since the dial-up days (note to self to redirect the domain from that to here) to record what’s going on. It’s just nice to see that it gets read.

This year’s top ten posts

So the top ten is half full of reviews, and then a comment piece on GM’s screens. RPGaDay2023 had three entries (game you’d like a new edition of, weirdest game played and favourite character sheet) so definitely drove traffic. Interestingly, several of that top ten have only been written recently. 

(The views on the post on GM Screens were also helped by Xaosseed sharing the post on the Shiny TTRP links post they do.)

I’ll be continuing into 2024; perhaps I’ll even get the final few posts from the old site migrated. 

What interests you that I post here?

1 January 2024