2023
Last year was the first time in a long time that I’ve set aside time to blog consistently and regularly.
All the M&M candies I ate in 2023. Grouped by "fun-size" package, sorted by color. Where there aren't very many, they're probably peanut or caramel.
The Numbers
2023 was a busy year for the blog. I moved to blot.im from the old blogger site. I published 78 posts total, 39 of which were revisiting my own earlier work. Of all the visitors, 4582 of them were tracked, and 20 left comments (2 more comments were my own).
The most popular posts were Tracking Through Spaces (327 tracked hits) and Deeper Catacombs (273 tracked hits). This makes sense because I promoted them the most places and also used the pages themselves as references in the games I ran with them. Coincidentally, they’re probably the posts I’m most pleased with.
The third most popular post was Ammunition (210 tracked hits). Probably because it blew up on Twitter and it’s short (RIP Twitter).
I consider myself a “numbers guy,” so I’d initially intended to do a more exhaustive analysis. But it felt a little navel-gazey and not that exciting, so I dropped it. In lieu of data, have some “key insights:”
- Of tracked visits, 49% are “unknown referral.” My suspicion is that this is mostly Discord-related traffic.
- Of tracked visits, somewhere between 17-20% are through internal site navigation (e.g. links between posts, or from a tag).
- Of tracked visits, 17% are from Twitter.
- Of tracked visits, fully 3% are from DIY & Dragons. Other blogs that linked to me include Bones of Contention, Seed of Worlds, Grave Robber’s Guide, Mindstorm, Tales from the Sorcerer’s Skull, The Glatisant, Stuffed Crocodile, and Eldritch Fields.
- Of tracked visits <1% came from search engines, <0.5% from Google.
- Two people came here from LinkedIn, one from Facebook, and one from a Google Doc. Bless you, LinkedIn game blog posters, whoever you are.
The Bloggies
I’m flattered by the praise of others as well as their eyes! Three of my posts from 2023 were nominated for the Bloggies:
- Models of High-Level Play (Theory)
- Deeper Catacombs (Gameable)
- Rod, Reel, & Fist (Review) (Review)
I smoothed out Zedeck's rabbit to see what it looks like as a scalable badge. But I'm not sure what to do with it now.
Voting in the Bloggies is ongoing, and I know that Zedeck is really going all-out in the organization of it. But to me, the real pleasure is having a list of posts to revisit or encounter for the first time. They’re every one of them winners to my mind.
That said, several of my nominations didn’t make the cut. I would also put forward this list of “cool blog posts I saw in 2023:”
- Mario vs ActRaiser vs Final Fantasy vs Zelda - Types of Advancement in RPGs
- Spell Friend and Enter
- Magic Gold from the Future
- A Patterned Magic
- d12 Weird Woods
- 1d6 Strange Stones & Gems
- The Adventure Point-Crawl Campaign
- Simple Monsters for Simple Combat
- Folie à Trois: Trophy Gold
- Kobolds, those poor bastards
2024
I’d say something optimistic, but who am I kidding? It’s gonna be a shit show like every other year. We’ll just keep playing games through it.
Sputnik and Liliana.