I haven’t done any of those posts about all of my blogs stats yet, but it’s my blog’s third anniversary, so now seems like a good time.
I used to blog on my EQ guild’s website, but decided to jump to full ‘blog-dom’ because I felt I was littering up the guild site with stuff nobody cared about. With a blog, I could post stuff up that nobody would ever see, but would be safe on the web from anything that happened to my computer, and I could go back to read what I was doing any particular day.
It was more an online diary than a blog.
Another reason – I’d just started World of Warcraft, and felt it wouldn’t be a smooth move to talk about playing WoW on my EQ guild’s message boards. My first gaming post was about WoW.
I started my blog using the SimplePHPBlog software, which I found by typing “simple php blog” into Google. About a year and a half later, I switched to Wordpress. There were lots of errors in the conversion process, so older entries can be missing pictures, working links, or most of the text.
On May 14, 2007, I signed up for Google Analytics, and finally was able to get some idea of what people were finding on the site.
Since that date, I have had 180,286 visits comprising 270,105 page views. The most active day was 1,329 page views on February 19, 2008, when an article about Warhammer was linked by Tobold.
West Karana currently gets between 600 and 700 visitors a day, and this has held pretty steady. I did an experiment with writing about Warhammer a lot when it came out (Straight Talk Warhammer) and having two to four articles every day, and I got my page views above 700, but it was a lot of work. The most popular day is Friday. The most popular time is between 8 and noon, Eastern time.
Since I started tracking, the ten most popular destinations have been:
The Lord of the Rings Online category.
The EverQuest 2 category.
The Weighted Companion Cube is your only friend, an article about a 3D model I did for Portal’s WCC.
The Next EQ2 Expansion is…?, an article speculating on what the next EQ2 expansion might be about. Clearly people are really excited about The Shadow Odyssey!
Mythos Beta. Anything about the Mythos Beta, or anything especially dealing with beta keys, was a huge draw. Excitement for Mythos was incredible. If Flagship had been able to release it, it would have been HUGE.
EQ Comics, comics I did about raiding in EverQuest. They really only make sense if you were there, and were used as a recruitment tool for our guild. I definitely think there’s room for a real, daily or weekly web comic set, in EverQuest. Yes, I know about WTF Comics. WTF’s twice-a-year update schedule is frustrating. GU Comics started out as a one-panel comic about EQ and was one of the funniest EQ comics going (there were quite a few EQ comics back in the day).
EQ2 Kunark – a BRIEF first look. I posted this just before RoK went live.
EQ2 – New summoner pets. Screen shots of new pets ftw :)
Excluding searches like “west karana” or searches that clearly showed people were specifically trying to get here via a search, the ten most popular search terms were:
wizard 101- eq2 expansion
mythos beta invite- eq2 kunark
master p’tasa- eq2 aa mirror
eq2 venril sathir- eq2 coa
ps3 vs xbox 360- rock band 2 controllers
Wizard 101 only has two bloggers (the other is The Friendly Necromancer). It’s really clear that if you want traffic, the best thing is to write about something other people aren’t writing about. I write about W101 because I love the game. Past that, people want guides and hints on raids and other things more than diary entries, and writing about more games than just MMOs is a win.
Best keyword searches of the last month:
aoc naked
eq3 for ps3 (yes please)
funny bright wizard names
keen family sing along blog blogspot (heading over to Keen and Graev’s for this…!)
is eq dead (no. people want it to be, but it stays inconveniently going).
jericho season 4 (whoa, what happened to Season 3?)
new mmorpg better than wow (totally depends on what you mean by better)
potbs pirate server (now that I think about it, kinda appropriate)
python is widely used for (Python is widely used for EVERYTHING. Best. Language. EVAH.)
skeeterflea (okay, I have no idea how this leads HERE.)
talk to a priest (likewise…)
search me sucks (still not as bad as Cuill, though)
does the lord put greater expectations on the genius (isn’t this the sort of thing you discuss with your pastor?)
how do i fly on a pegasus in vanguard (see? it’s NOT just me.)
pirates of the burning sea hentai (okay, stopping here).
When I started West Karana, I was pretty sure nobody would ever read anything I wrote. But that was good, because I couldn’t really think of anything to write about, anyway. Three years on, I realize that blogging is really about finding a community and becoming a part of it. It doesn’t matter so much what you write about or even how you write it. It’s about the people you meet along the way. I could never have met such amazing people in any other way. Some of you have become my closest friends.
So, thank you all for a great three years. I am so lucky to be part of such a wonderful community.