State of the Blog 2024

Overview for the year

 I've posted more to the blog this year (125 posts vs 95 in 2023) but I've no real explanation why, especially as my posts on Shadows of Atlantis haven't been a numerous as the ones that I did for Curse of Strahd. Interaction is up (92.8k unique views vs 83.6k last year) and I continue to see a lot of interaction around posts on Mastodon (and if I post on various Facebook groups, especially the Traveller RPG one, that often spikes traffic). 

Traffic was particularly high between February and May, then became stable at a low level (even through the RPGaDay hoopla) before jumping up in December. That spike is most likely a combination of holidays and the repeated Traveller posts that I've made.

The top ten posts in 2024...

My most viewed post in 2024 (and now all time) was the review of Wulfwald, which landed before there were many other reviews out there. It was one of my more in-depth walk-throughs and seemed to be attractive to folks out there. It had a lot of traffic via Bluesky and Mastodon.

The second highest was one talking about Dice by pCalc which was boosted by the app's creator on Mastodon and got a lot of views. This was part of RPGaDay 2024, which I did in full.

Reviews of Dragonbane, Outgunned, Cepheus Universal and Orbital 2100 all got a lot of interest, as did the TravCon 2024 after action report. A block of that is the Traveller hard-core!

Eighth place saw a post on GM Screens from November 2023 which was boosted by Xaosseed and somehow stayed popular into 2024. This was closely followed by an RPGaDay post on the A|State Tower screen. Unsure what drives the interest in screens, but fascinating to see.

The last entry in the Top Ten came with this months post on the forthcoming availability for The Encyclopaedia of Dagudashaag in print, a December post, so obviously there's a hunger for new Traveller content.

If I wanted to keep this just to posts from 2024, then I need to bring in the eleventh placed post, where I broke down 17 years of games that I've run at Furnace. 

Overall, I'm still enjoying keeping the blog. 

I've had some frustrations getting the older material migrated; the browser on my old MacBook has been deprecated and I can no longer download a copy of RapidWeaver 7 to put it on the newer MacBook Pro (as Realmac Software have moved to a subscription model and old versions aren't available on the App Store or their site). I have considered subscribing, but I'm not convinced that I'd be able to open the older files easily enough. It may be that I need to use the preview export of the blog and cut and paste from that, but the priority is migrating the remaining data from the MacBook is it's gone very slow and DropBox doesn't support the app anymore (although I can get access via the browser).

One thing that Mastodon has taught me it to take the time to put Alt-text in for images where possible. If you don't do that on the social network there, you get gentle reminders from others!

If you want to catch me on social media, I'm easily findable. The bridged account from the Fediverse drives most of my interaction with Bluesky because I have found I enjoy the engagement quality of Mastodon often better. I don't generally accept Facebook requests from folks I'm not sure I know, so reach out if you're trying to link up that way so I know why!

Anyway, here's to 2025, and another year of blogs.

1 January 2025