The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob: Triaminoguanidine Nitrate

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Thursday, September 12, 2019

The Thirteenth Floor

Another year has come and gone and here we are at thirteen.

This car does not stop at that floor

Thirteen is an unlucky number to some, but it has always been a bit of a talisman in our family, something of an attraction rather than an aversion. I went skydiving with a friend on Friday the 13th, picking that day specifically for the unlucky connotation. In the end though, it is just a number, something that passes by fleetingly, unless you’re 13 years old. I’ve never been more miserable in my life than when I was 13, an age that seemed to last forever.

Now my blog is thirteen. I hope it isn’t as bad off as I was at that age.

For those new to the site… how did you end up here… this is an annual tradition. If you’re a glutton for punishment, there are twelve past entries to review.

I used to do cute themes for this post. Years five and six are probably the best efforts for that, while I think eight is where I get the most philosophical. That is where I said I would stop blogging at the ten year mark. But here I am. There are days when I am just so very tired that I can barely crank out the 2,000 words that make up the core of the post like this. Cute pictures and the philosophy of the internet just aren’t in me anymore.

But on we go, as we do every year, for a look behind the curtain at the numbers and such that inform about this blog.

Base Statistics

The same thing every year, looking at how the various needled moved over the last dozen months.

Days since launch: 4,748 (+365)
Posts total: 5,215 (+420)
Total Words: 3,967,279 (not including this post)
Average words per post: 761.18
Post Likes: 9,521
Average posts per day: 1.098 (+0.05)
Comments: 32,451 (+1,670)
Average comments per post: 6.22 (-0.20)
Average comments per day: 6.83 (-0.18)
Spam comments: 1,482,548 (+32,607)
Comments Rescued from the Spam Filter: 438 (+4)
Average spam comments per day: 312.24 (-18.7)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 45.6 (-1)
Comments written by me: 6,430 or 19.8%
Images uploaded: 14,575 (+1,432)
Space used by images: 603.7MB 1.2 GB of my 3 GB allocation (33%, up 100%)
Blog Followers: 1,701 (+209)
Twitter Followers: 743 (+14)
Tumblr Followers: 33 (+7)
US Presidents since launch: 3
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 7

Much more after the cut, if you feel like looking at a lot of charts, lists, and numbers. Actual page view numbers are available.

Demographics

Some year either something will change in this section or I’ll stop doing it. Either way, the US dominates the numbers every time. English language gaming blog appeals mostly in countries where English is common spoken, film at 11.

Flag Counter Country Chart

I use the Flag Counter sidebar widget stats since, frankly, all web stats are garbage, but I’ve been using the widget longer than WP.com has been keeping track of countries. Also, the widget is better at counting people just once.

As I noted last year, I subscribed to Flag Counter to get some of their marginally deeper stats. So, for example, they tell me these are the browsers and operating systems you all use.

Flag Counter browser and OS stats

Chrome is down a bit over last years abbreviated stats, which is a bit of a surprise, since earlier this year Microsoft Edge started using the Chrome engine, so it identifies as Chrome 58 when queried. But, then, I suspect almost nobody uses Edge. Before the update it constantly crashed when I tried to use it on with my reasonably fresh install of Window 10.

Windows is still the dominate operating system. A lot of you still use Window 7, though I cannot blame you, since we’re still using it at work as well. Mobile are the next two big ones, with Linux, MacOS, and whatever else hidden in the “others” slice.

And so it goes. That is what the stats say about the visitors.

Incoming!

Who sends traffic here? I mean, besides Google. Google, and the other search engines, get their own area. From just normal blogs and gaming sites and the like, the following send me the most user.

Over The Last Year

Total EVE remains the dominant player in sending me traffic. That can’t all be just Dirk MacGirk clicking on links there, can it? It is a nice summary site that has feeds from all over the EVE Online social media universe. EVE Bloggers is in second, but traffic from there has tapered off somewhat. I think Steve needs to prune some of the deadwood from the site, as there are a lot of dead blogs on the main page.

Then we get into prolific and popular bloggers, followed by the less prolific and sometimes completely dead blogs. I am sure Gevlon would be happy to know that his old blog, the one on Blogger he abandoned because he didn’t like Google, still sends me traffic.

Over The Life of the Blog

Over the life of the blog… well, there are 13 years worth of traffic to overcome to climb that list. I think Virgin Worlds hasn’t had me in its front page feed for at least five years at this point, but it still tops the list. It was quite the source of traffic back in the heyday of blogging. Other familiar names are on the list as well.

And then there is social media. Not a lot of traffic comes in daily, but it does add up over time.

Over The Last Year

WordPress.com Reader
Reddit
Twitter
Facebook
forums-archive.eveonline.com
tagn-wordpress-com.cdn.ampproject.org
WordPress Android App
forums.daybreakgames.com
old.reddit.com
Google News

The WordPress.com reader remains something of a wonder. The fact that you can use it to search on categories and tags for all of their hosted blogs makes it an invaluable resource for finding blogs, and some people have clearly found mine that way.

Over The Life of the Blog

WordPress.com Reader
Google Reader
Reddit
Twitter
Facebook
feedly.com
Netvibes
massiveblips.dailyradar.com
WordPress Android App
theoldreader.com

Again, WordPress Reader has taken over first place, but Google Reader, gone more than six years at this point, persists in second place. Also on the gone list was Massive Blips. That was a pretty good aggregator for its time.

Search Engines

And then the search engines, or Google and everybody else. This is a bit more interesting because the site tools that the search engines give you allow you to get a bit more insight into what brings people to click on the link to your site.

Over The Last Year

Google Search
Bing
duckduckgo.com
Yahoo Search
Yandex
Baidu
Ask.com
MSN
myway.com
AOL

That is a fine list, but Google makes up 97% of the search engine traffic that comes to me. I actually signed up for Google, Bing, and Yandex site admin access to more directly feed them updates to my blog, but that made no real difference… to anything really. Overall traffic is down, and that means that search engine traffic is down because Google makes up the lion’s share of my new, random, or drive by traffic. If I get 500 page views in a day, 200 of them will be from Google, and if I get 1,500 page views in a day, 1,200 of them will be from Google.

Over The Life of the Blog

Google Search
Google Image Search
Bing
Yahoo Search
Google Mobile
Ask.com
Yahoo Image Search
Yandex
duckduckgo.com
isearch.avg.com

Likewise, over the life of the blog Google still dominates. Google Image Search is a relic of the pre-2012 way that Google handled image searches. They would send people to your site if they clicked on an image from your blog. Now they cache it and show it in full size and never trouble your site again. As I have noted in the past, this led to the big decline in traffic in 2013. That GIS is still number two tells you how much traffic that was.

Going deeper into search engines, now that I have been signed up with Google site management for over a year, I can share some search data from that. Here are the top dozen search terms that send traffic to the blog.

Google Search Terms – 12 Months

The term “ukdrillas” is from this past weekend and the WoW Classic DDoS attack. People get antsy when their game is interrupted. Variation on how many people play EVE Online is pretty strong, and that has gone up some recently as well, no doubt a side effect of the Chaos Era.

Bing will only grab you six months worth of data, but here are the search terms that they send me. You can compare the impressions and clicks and draw your own conclusion.

Bing Search Terms – Past Six Months

The top term from Google got 2,578 clicks, and the top term from Bing got 14. Even if you double it to make it a full year, that is 28 or about 1% of Google.

Outgoing!

People do occasionally click on links and things in the side bar and are sent off to other places on the internet. The places most clicked are:

Over The Last Year – Bloggers:

bhagpuss.blogspot.com
nosygamer.blogspot.com
syncaine.wordpress.com
blessingofkings.blogspot.com
mmofallout.com
biobreak.wordpress.com
evehermit.wordpress.com
http://www.keenandgraev.com
evepics.wordpress.com
aywren.com

I think there is pretty solid correlation between how often I link out to somebody and where they appear on that list. Otherwise, I think all of them appear somewhere in my feeds on the side bar. My dynamic pseudo Blogger-style feed shows its worth.

Over The Last Year – Commercial-ish sites:

en.wikipedia.org
imperium.news
massivelyop.com
http://www.reddit.com
zkillboard.com
eve-offline.net
http://www.eveonline.com
http://www.wowwiki.com
us.forums.blizzard.com
Twitter

For commercial, and commercial-like sites, It is pretty much a matter of who I link out to. Wikipedia, my go to source for keeping me from getting side-tracked explaining things, tops the list.

Over The Life of the Blog – Bloggers:

syncaine.wordpress.com
http://www.keenandgraev.com
blessingofkings.blogspot.com
evepics.wordpress.com
http://www.killtenrats.com
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
biobreak.wordpress.com
tobolds.blogspot.com
playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com
jestertrek.blogspot.com

SynCaine tops the list for all time. No doubt some Friday blog wars residuals in that. Still, a lot of familiar faces there.

Over The Life of the Blog – Commercial-ish sites:

nickyee.com/python/guildname/generator.py
en.wikipedia.org
http://www.pokemon.com
forums.civfanatics.com
us.battle.net
http://www.pokemongoldsilver.com
myeve.eve-online.com
us.blizzard.com
http://www.eve-online.com
swganh.com

Oh, the Nick Yee guild name generator, it still owns overall, thanks to Google. And for Wikipedia, the most clicked on link leading there is for Castle Wolfenstein, the original Apple II game, not any of the later versions.

Most Viewed Posts

Over The Last Year

A not unexpected result of the coming of WoW Classic has been more people looking for the classic Alamo druid post. Then there are people worried about EVE Online and people worried about Daybreak, followed by more practical searches I guess.

Over The Life of the Blog

Inertia rules again. Alamo continues to climb slowly up that list, but that guild name generator post had a big early lead.

Categories and Tags

Categories and the high level topics that I write about here, and so to look at categories is to look at the games I write about in broad strokes. I currently have 96 categories for the blog. Some of them were optimistic. I made a category for Elite: Dangerous and then wrote only two posts about the game. That could have been a tag. But otherwise categories do reflect what gets posted around here. The top 20 most used categories are:

EVE Online 1,563
World of Warcraft 1,233
EverQuest II 695
EverQuest 562
Lord of the Rings Online 416
Blizzard 366
Sony Online Entertainment 339
Instance Group 282
Humor 236
Pokemon 222
Misc MMOs 193
blog thing 185
Rift 161
Month in Review 156
YouTube 146
Nintendo DS Hardware 141
Other PC Games 137
Diablo III 135
Vanguard SOH 134
Minecraft 122

EVE Online passed World of Warcraft a few years back, but I have to wonder if the coming of WoW Classic (which is also a category) will see WoW regain some ground on New Eden. Also the Instance Group category, dormant for some years now, will be reviving a bit as well.

Tags are the more whimsical part of the system here, being subject to immediate mood or fancy. I throw them out with abandon. They fill in for games that don’t rate a category, details like zones or solar systems or expansions, or sometimes just my general feelings about a post or warnings to the reader. There are 3,645 tags used over the last 13 years, up 252 from last year. I continue to make up a new tag for a lot of posts it seems.

With so many tags it is hard to pick a range. The top ten stay don’t vary much year over year, tag inertia having set in. Here they are and how often they have been used:

Progression Server 117
Reavers 84
Select Fippy Darkpaw 83
Select Nostalgia 80
Select Asher Elias 80
Select Meaningless Milestones 75
Select Pokemon Go 73
Select MMO Expansions 65
Select Warlords of Draenor 64
Select Free-To-Play 63

But to find something for this anniversary, I thought I would also list out the tags that have been used exactly 13 times. They are:

Scarlet Monastery
PvP
Cats
Leuthilspar Tales
World of Warcraft Magazine
Toys R Us
West Karana
Newbie Blogger Initiative
Steam Summer Sale
DBRB
Meandering
Pandemic Legion
Loremaster
Guardians of the Galaxy
Fall Movie League
CSM13
Spring Movie League

That is probably a more interesting cross-section of tags. To start with, if I have used them 13 times, they are solid tags. There are a lot of one off tags in the full list. Over half of them, actually. But these are good, and they are all over the map, from FML seasons that were 13 weeks long to an EverQuest zone to a series of stories about TorilMUD to a WoW instance and so on. I do like that CSM13 got 13 mentions. Seems appropriate.

A Peek Into Page Views

Here we are at the one day a year when I bare the raw page view stats for the world to see.

Total Page Views by Month/Year

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year

You can click on either of those charts to see them full size, which would make them more legible for sure.

Traffic here continues to decline from its peak in 2012. As I said, and which you can see in the numbers, the first big hit was the Google Image View change of early 2013. And, after that, things have slowly eroded. But it corresponds somewhat with a creeping conservatism on my part when it comes to games I suppose. I am writing about the same few games in 2019 that I was back in 2006, all of which are clearly past their peak and thus their public interest.

I did wonder at one point is the decline in page views would alter my desire to write. I mean, it is easy to say page views don’t matter, but when you’re running at 30% of your past peak, that is the rubber hitting the road. And yet I keep on writing lots of posts, but we’ll get to that in the next section.

So Very Many Words

My favorite table I suppose. I write a lot of words.

September 2019 – Word count, like, and comment numbers – Click on it to make it bigger/readable

While page views seem to be in decline, I remain on track for close to 400 posts again this year. My average words per post is down a bit for 2019, but we haven’t hit the end of the year verbose summary of things that happened season.

Something I Didn’t Mention the Last Dozen Times I Did This Post

I think one of the possible revelations I have had over the last few years in my blogging is a greater desire to write for posterity beyond simply recording what I was playing and what I thought about it at a given time. I wrote a chaotic post addressing this during Blaugust, which is when things became a little more clear to me on that front. I end up writing a lot of blog posts that are not about my playing something, or even myself directly, but rather events and changes around the games I watch and play.

Yes, I have mentioned the desire for having context and dates and what not. But I do at times start to boarder on something akin to a news site for brief stretches of time in order to get there because sometimes the sign posts are as important as the things in between I guess. I make no commitment to covering every bit of, say, Norrath related news coming out of Daybreak, but I will likely continue to hit the high points, the expansions and plans and, perhaps, the eventual landing place for the franchise should dey break up.

Forward Looking Statements

If I am unreliable as a narrator… and I assure you I am… then my ability to forecast falls beyond that into abysmal.

I mean sure, I get some things correct now and then. If I predict that I will play WoW or EVE Online at the beginning of the year it is likely to come to pass. But I am pretty sure any semi-regular reader could have predicted that as well. I don’t think there has been a year during the life of the blog where I have not played them both, at least for a little while.

But more refined or less obvious looks into the future? Have you seen my annual predictions post? The 2019 version is going to be hilariously wrong when I review it come December.

So I will go with the safe view that, barring some major life changing event, things will go on as before. I will keep writing month in review posts and noting the various launches, closures, expansions, updates, changes, and announcements that touch the games that interest me.

I have to say “interest me” now, as the number I actually play seems to grow smaller as time goes on. And, honestly, so does the number that interests me. A few years ago I might have written about SWTOR expansions or major changes, or something going on in GW2. Now I feel too far outside of those orbits to comment except in the most general way.

But I am a person who finds some comfort in routine. That and the sunk cost fallacy will probably keep me writing. I’d hardly be an MMORPG player if I wasn’t a sucker for sunk costs.

Anyway, thank you for stopping by for another year. WordPress.com, my platform (and some times nemesis) has given me my annual achievement.

achievement unlocked

As always, I am sure there is some exciting news coming for the games I play and the companies that make them, and I will likely be here to pummel that to death with an excess of verbiage.

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

The Dozens

We have now arrived at the twelve year mark of the blog. In looking for a title, The Dozens sprang to mind one evening and I thought it was a theme I could run with. I would just replace the usual array of category titles with self-deprecating insults about the deficiencies of the blog. Things like, “Your blogging is so weak, you only get accidental traffic from Google” or “You ramble so much that when you post around the house you post all the way around the house.”

Only, you know, actually funny.

That was back in February or so. I created the placeholder post, scheduled it so I wouldn’t accidentally publish it, then went on to do almost nothing with it until about a week ago.

So here I am an all I have to show for that title is a stock photo of eggs.

Photo by Lukas on Pexels.com

WordPress.com has access to a library of free stock photos and that is literally the best I could come up with for the word “dozen.” And I am not even sure what that green braided cord is. Some sort of vegan whip maybe?

Seriously, this sort of post looms over me at times, in part because I’ve done a credible job on occasion with this anniversary thing. I mean, go back and look at years five or six. (Cue linking to past efforts!)

Year six was pretty cute. But where I am I lately? Elf? Is that all I’ve got? And now a stock photo of a dozen eggs? And WP.com didn’t even pop my anniversary achievement in time for this post, so I had to mock up my own.

Pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing

Anyway, I am as half-assed in this as I am in so many things, so maybe I should just move on to some numbers. Numbers are good. I can hide in numbers.

Base Statistics

Days since launch: 4,383 (+365)
Posts total: 4,794 (+378)
Total Words: 3,537,779 (not including this post)
Average words per post: 738.11
Post Likes: 6,765
Average posts per day: 1.093 (-0.04)
Comments: 30,781 (+1,366)
Average comments per post: 6.42 (-0.24)
Average comments per day: 7.01 (-0.31)
Spam comments: 1,449,941 (+73,796)
Comments Rescued from the Spam Filter: 434 (+10)
Average spam comments per day: 330.8 (-11.7)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 47.2 (+2)
Comments written by me: 4,198 or 13.7% (+0.6%)
Images uploaded: 13,143 (+1,379)
Space used by images: 603.7MB of my 3 GB allocation (20%, up 11%)
Blog Followers: 1,491 (+151)
Twitter Followers: 730 (+8)
Tumblr Followers: 26 (+4)
US Presidents since launch: 3
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 7 (+1)

I have at least kept up with my goal of posting every weekday… and then some. I am actually up 24 posts over last year which puts me over the one a day mark again.

Comments were down quite sharply in the first half of the year. The inertia of past years and a rather active August kept the average up, but the comments per post from January to June dropped in half over the previous years. I suspect that I didn’t write much controversial or stunning during that period, but it was still a pretty sharp fall off.

Anyway, those are the basic stats. After the cut there are a lot more bits of data about the blog, some you may have seen in past years along with a few new items this year.

And here we go.

Demographics

As I have said in the past, I thought this might be interesting to look at over time, but the results barely change at all year over year. The US dominates the numbers every time.

The same map every year Pinky

The top five remain the same, those being populous developed nations with a significant number of English speaking citizens.

United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Germany
Australia

In the top ten France and the Netherlands jockey for position, but you have to get down to about 20 to see things change much, and then the numbers get so small that it is tough to care.

Flag Counter Percentages

At the other end of things, according to Flag Counter I have never had a visitor from the following places:

Chad
Christmas Island
Comoros
Nauru
Niue
Norfolk Island
Palau
Saint Helena
Sao Tome and Principe
South Sudan
Svalbard
Tokelau
Tonga
Tuvalu
Wallis and Futuna

Not surprising I suppose. But not terribly interesting anymore.

So I thought I would look at some different data about people who visit the blog. To do so I signed up (and paid for) an upgrade to Flag Counter Pro. Flag Counter is that little thing down in my side bar that tries to track information about people who visit the site. I’ve had it there for nine years now, so I also figured it might be nice to throw them some money after all this time using their product.

It’s methodology is somewhat simplistic as it just counts based on how often that side bar thing gets loaded. That differs from how WordPress.com counts. For example, WP.com doesn’t count my traffic when I am logged in while Flag Counter does.

Still, it is some data collected in a consistent manner over time, so has some value if read knowing the limitations. By going pro it is now collecting more data about who visits the site. It isn’t pegged to IP addresses or anything, it is just the standard stuff that any web site gets when a browser hits it.

One thing I can now see is visitors from the US broken out by state. Unsurprisingly, that ranking closely mirrors the populations of the states, with California at the top and Wyoming at the bottom. Go figure.

Canadian provinces are a little off, with Ontario at the top by a long shot despite being in second place in population. But the most populous province is Quebec where speaking English is frowned upon, so no mystery why it is in first. Nunavut is, of course, last. I’ve only had 19 visits from there.

One of the things that got unlocked was the information about which browser and operating system visitors use. That information gets pulled by every site you visit. The browser data surprised me a bit.

2018 User Browser Data

I was not aware that Chrome was that popular. Then again, I live in a world where data center agents are forced to use Internet Explorer, so most of my job is dealing with issues with that. While no unique identifying information is shown by Flag Counter, I can see myself hitting the site in their figures as I am the repeat visitor from California using Firefox.

What I see at Flag Counter… also click on the image to see full size

Operating systems are similarly stratified.

2018 Visitor Operating Systems

Again, I am surprised how many people have gone with Windows 10, though I am frankly more surprised at the number of people still hanging on to Windows 8 in some form.

Anyway, I thought that would make for a bit more interesting look into demographics. Currently the data set isn’t that big. The browser and OS numbers uses the last 250,000 visitors, which is (and hopefully will remain) less than a year’s worth of traffic, so that will be fresh and likely more accurate data to look into again for year thirteen.

Incoming!

Time to look at the sources of traffic to the site. As I started doing last year, I am going to break this out into two categories. This time it will be bloggers and blogger sites for the first and commercial and social media sites for the second, while search engines will go elsewhere. There is a reason for this, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

First, bloggers and blogger sites over the last year.

totaleve.com
evebloggers.com
lowseclifestyle.com
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
blessingofkings.blogspot.com
nosygamer.blogspot.com
greedygoblin.blogspot.com
raphkoster.com
jestertrek.blogspot.com
nilsmmoblog.blogspot.com

Total EVE and EVE Bloggers are both community aggregation sites for EVE Online and they seem to get a decent amount of traffic. After that we’re into the usual suspects, with an exception.

Raph Koster’s blog figures there entirely due to the “how much should a video game cost?” discussion that came up late last year. A lot of people read that and clicked on the link to me he had in his post.

Nils MMO Blog and Jester’s Trek show the power of the Blogger side bar. Neither blog has been updated in ages, but some people still use those blogroll every day. In the same vein, Gevlon’s old blog keeps on delivering while his new WordPress.com blogroll is static and uninteresting.

Then the same category, but over the life of the blog.

virginworlds.com
blessingofkings.blogspot.com
evenews24.com
lowseclifestyle.com
evebloggers.com
totaleve.com
keenandgraev.com
syncaine.com
jestertrek.blogspot.com
popehat.com

Despite the fact that my posts no longer appear over at VirginWorld, its long time role as the core of our blogging neighborhood keeps it at the top of the list, though Rohan’s Blessing of Kings is within striking distance of it and will likely pass it over the next twelve months, barring any changes to the status quo.

EN24 remains on the list from the short era during which my posts were syndicated on the site, while EVE Bloggers and Total EVE continue to climb up the list.

Now for commercial site. Over the last year the following sites have sent me the most traffic.

Reddit
tagn-wordpress-com.cdn.ampproject.org
WordPress.com Reader
Twitter
Facebook
pcgamer.com
WordPress Android App
forums-archive.eveonline.com
forums.eveonline.com
spoutly.com/session.php

I broke these out because they are somewhat interesting. Reddit ebbs and flows. I don’t get mentioned there very often, but when I do it does bring traffic.

The AMP Project though… I am not really sure how I end up with traffic from that. My blog posts have AMP compatibility enabled though, so there we go.

I mentioned during Blaugust how far along the WP.com Reader has come, and the stats reflect it. Twitter is a slow drip, but regular, while Facebook will pretty much disappear from the list due to changes there to prevent “fake news.”

PC Gamer is there because Steven Messner was nice enough to credit me with an image he used in an EVE Online article of his. I was actually able to thank him for that last year at EVE Vegas.

The EVE Online forums are interesting. Traffic from the form archive is made up entirely of hits on my post about the demise of Battle Clinic, while the current forum traffic was from the old This Week in EVE posts that used a few of my images with credit.

Commercial sites over the life of the blog shake out like this.

WordPress.com Reader
Google Reader
Reddit
Twitter
feedly.com
Facebook
massively.joystiq.com
Netvibes
WordPress Dashboard
massiveblips.dailyradar.com

The WordPress.com Reader has improved enough to pass Google Reader, which has been gone more than five years now. Its replacement, Google+, comes in at 15th so doesn’t make the cut here.

Feedly isn’t as popular, though people don’t always click through because I publish full posts to my feed. And then there is Massive Blips, which used to be a decent traffic source for a while.

One of my favorite entries that didn’t make the list is from Stack Exchange, where I got a bit of traffic due to a post being linked in a thread about voxels.

And that is where most of my non-search engine traffic comes from.

Search Engines

I actually have more, and more detailed, information about search engines this year. In part this is because during Blaugust I went and got the blog signed up with the tools for Google, Bing, and Yandex to see if that would make any difference in traffic. In a month, it has not, though it has given me a lot of data. But let’s start by ranking the traffic I get from search engines. For this I even have percentages.

Over the last year:

Google Search 98.86498%
Bing 0.32854%
Yandex 0.27392%
Yahoo Search 208 0.16708%
Google Image Search 0.11728%
Ask.com 0.08675%
duckduckgo.com 87 0.06988%
myway.com 0.03534%
Baidu 0.01205%
att.net 0.00723%
MSN 0.00643%
earthlink.net 0.00562%
Yahoo Image Search 0.00562%
t-online.de 0.00562%
ixquick.com 0.00321%
live.com 0.00241%
biglobe.ne.jp 0.00241%
kvasir.no 0.00161%
talktalk.co.uk 0.00161%
AOL 0.00161%

These days Google, Bing, and Yandex are the top three, but frankly if you’re not Google you’re barely worth a mention. That is probably the only time AOL makes any lists these days. The actual number for AOL was two.

Over the life of the blog:

Google Search 78.5733%
Google Image Search 18.3100%
Bing 1.2414%
Yahoo Search 0.7000%
Google Mobile 0.1545%
Ask.com 0.1422%
Yahoo Image Search 0.1165%
isearch.avg.com 0.1046%
wow.com 0.0986%
Yandex 0.0937%
search.babylon.com 0.0814%
AOL 0.0570%
Conduit.com Search 0.0555%
search-results.com 0.0550%
duckduckgo.com 0.0549%
search.comcast.net 0.0414%
mywebsearch.com 0.0226%
live.com 0.0161%
sweetim.com 0.0160%
dogpile.com 0.0134%

Google is still king over the years, though that Google Image Search entry is a sore spot. Up into January 2013 the image search would bring you to the site host the image if you clicked on it. Now it just makes the image bigger and shows variations on it. That is where a lot of my traffic went and explains why 2012 was the peak year for the blog. Five years later that is still 18% of my total search engine traffic despite having dropped to the negligible “less than Yahoo” level of influence, so back then it was a much bigger slice of the pie.

Then again, search engine traffic is transitory. They make for page views, but do they stick around and become readers? Maybe a few do, but I would bet that 99% move on never to return.

Anyway, that is all fine and good, but what else do I have that warrants putting search engines in their own section? First, in having signed up for the webmaster stuff for the search engines I can confirm that Bing is shit in that regard as it is in most things. Having used Google and Bing side by side, I can’t imagine what Bing is thinking. Oh well.

Also, having signed up thinking I might end up with more traffic proved to be false. At least in the short term. The three having indexed my blog… well, Google and Yandex having done so while Bing is still thinking about it a month later… might lead to that, but for now there was no noticeable change at my end, despite Bing’s joyous news.

Bing reports a surge in traffic!

That, by the way, is actually a combination of Bing and Yahoo traffic. It all comes together these days. I get more traffic from Russia via Yandex.

What I did find, at least with the Google site, was access to data I had been missing. Google doesn’t pass on search terms to sites under most conditions anymore. They just come through as unknown. However, in the Google web tools you get to see all the search terms that get used multiple times. So I can again see what brings people to the blog. So, over the last month these have been the top search terms.

August 2018 search data – click to make bigger/readable

That is only for a month, but next year I will have a full 12 months of data.

Clicks are how often people actually clicked through and showed up here.

Impressions are how often the site showed up in a search on that term.

And CTR is the click through ratio, or how many clicks against impressions.

96.2% of people who search on “ancient gaming noob” click through and end up here. I do wonder about that other 3.8%.

There is another chart from Google that I want to share, and this is the one related to sites linking to the blog. I have sorted it by target pages linked.

Site Linking to Posts at TAGN

I find this data to be pretty funny.

Sure, the top entry on the list is no surprise. Again, while VirginWorlds hasn’t linked directly here in years now, a long history of linkage remains.

And WordPress.com probably isn’t surprising. The overall linking pages, ringing in at over 3 million, seems huge. I am not sure how that is calculated. But since I know that Google sifts through all of the tag and category pages that WP.com generates, it doesn’t seem impossible.

Blogspot.com though… you know, Blogger… could be all those magic blog rolls I guess. Either that or Bhagpuss links to me a lot more than I think he does.

After that though, the chart is made up entirely of sites that steal my content. This is why I recommend you link back to your old posts when writing on a related topic. Content stealing sites don’t seem keen on cleaning out links so you might as well enjoy some benefit, which in this case probably boosts my Page rank a bit. At least it might keep it from slipping below 4 in any case

Outgoing!

Now on to where I send traffic. Again, I will break this out between bloggers and commercial(-ish) sites, just because.

-Click Destinations over the Last Year – Bloggers

nosygamer.blogspot.com
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
biobreak.wordpress.com
syncaine.com
greedygoblinblog.wordpress.com
evepics.wordpress.com
http://www.keenandgraev.com
blessingofkings.blogspot.com
endgameviable.com
http://www.killtenrats.com

I link to Nosy Gamer a lot when it comes to EVE Online topics, and Bhagpuss when we are going on about Daybreak, so there is no surprise finding them at the top for the year. Otherwise the influence of my own hacked-together side bar blogroll and how often the sites in question post probably explains the list for the most part.

-Click Destinations over the Last Year – Commercial(-ish) Sites

Wikipedia
Battle.net
Playhearthstone.com
Worldofwarcraft.com
Reddit
zkillboard.com
Imperium News
Massivelyop.com
community.eveonline.com (Dev Blogs and Patch Notes)
Kickstarter

I think the April Fools post puts Blizzard out in front every year. I certainly don’t link to Hearthstone very much otherwise. I think five and below are related to things I post about a lot over the rest of the year, while Wikipedia is my main link out to explain topics I do not wish to diverge into. I ramble enough as it is.

-Click Destinations over the Life of the Blog – Bloggers

syncaine.wordpress.com
http://www.keenandgraev.com
blessingofkings.blogspot.com
evepics.wordpress.com
http://www.killtenrats.com
biobreak.wordpress.com
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
tobolds.blogspot.com
jestertrek.blogspot.com
playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com

Here we’re more beholding to how long and how prolific a given blogger has been. SynCaine and I have been going back and forth for years.

-Click Destinations over the Life of the Blog – Commercial(-ish) Sites

WoW Guild Name Generator
Pokemon.com
Wikipedia
Civfanatics.com
Battle.net
pokemongoldsilver.com
myeve.eve-online.com
Blizzard.com
eve-online.com
pokemonblackwhite.com

And then there is the weight of inertia as that Nick Yee WoW Guild Name Generator post has received more traffic (as noted in the next section) than any other post ever. Ah well, Nick has enough of a lead that it will be years before something else is at the top when it comes to outbound clicks.

Most Viewed Posts

Over the past year.

It is interesting to see which posts get traction over time. Again, since such a large percentage of people visiting the site get here via Google, posts that Google favors bubble up the list. As I have noted in my last two month in review posts, certain articles seem to have become regular targets for search engine traffic.

Over All Time

The weight of time favors older posts over newer ones here. Some of these are really old and get no traffic these days, but were popular enough for a while to secure a spot on the list. The most recent post on this list is number 10. Posted in March of 2017 it has been a search engine favorite.

Categories and Tags

Categories are the stable staple of the blog filing system here at TAGN, at least one being assigned to every post. Leaving out the generic “entertainment” category, a legacy of the early days of WP.com, there are 94 categories on the site. That is up four from last year, which is a pretty radical change for me. “Fantasy Movie League” and “WoW Classic” were added, while “Steam” was moved from being a tag to a category.

The top twenty most used are:

EVE Online – 1,383
World of Warcraft – 1,137
EverQuest II – 660
EverQuest – 523
Lord of the Rings Online – 377
Blizzard – 338
Sony Online Entertainment – 336
Instance Group – 274
Humor – 234
Pokemon – 211
Misc MMOs – 189
blog thing – 178
Rift – 158
Month in Review – 144
Nintendo DS Hardware – 139
Vanguard SOH – 134
YouTube – 134
Other PC Games – 131
Diablo III – 128
Minecraft – 107

While categories are not mutually exclusive… I can write about WoW and EVE in the same post… that does give a pretty good hint as to what I write about most.

The least used categories are:

Elite: Dangerous (2)
Neverwinter Nights 2 (4)
World of Warships (7)
WoW Classic (7)
Random (8)
RPGs (9)
memes (9)
Path of Exile (9)
Gaming Industry Trends (10)
Neverwinter (11)

Clearly there are a few games I thought I would play, or at least post about, more than I did. I expect the “WoW Classic” category to get used a lot more in the future. A couple are kind of vague I suppose, like “Gaming Industry Trends” and “RPGs.” And “memes” doesn’t mean what you think it does. A decade back a blog meme was a topic where you tagged a few other people to do it after you responded. That has fallen out of favor as blogging has.

Tags are the more whimsical part of the system here, being subject to immediate mood or fancy. They fill in for games that don’t rate a category, details like zones or solar systems or expansions, or sometimes just my general feelings about a post or warnings to the reader. There are 3,393 tags used over the last 12 years, up 189 from last year. I continue to make up a new tag for a lot of posts it seems.

The top twenty tags I have used are:

CCP (119)
Progression Server (109)
Fippy Darkpaw (83)
Nostalgia (77)
Reavers (75)
Asher Elias (74)
Meaningless Milestones (70)
Warlords of Draenor (63)
Free-To-Play (62)
MMO Expansions (59)
Pokemon Go (54)
RMT (45)
Casino War (44)
Cataclysm (43)
Delve (42)
WoW Legion (42)
Contest (41)
Pokemon SoulSilver (39)
Pokemon Diamond (38)
StarCraft II (38)

I think there are probably a few more tags that should become categories. I write about CCP and Progression Servers more than Minecraft it seems. “Nostalgia” is probably an under used tag on the list.

There isn’t much point in trying to list the least used tags since there are a bunch that I have used but once. But here is a list of odd one time tags:

i can haz sarnak burger?
Michael Jackson
Michael Nesmith
a softer world
Meridian Quad
Wally Cox
stuff that costs a lot of ISK
Anivilmar Hammer of the Beast
Fjord Penguins
EVE Quirks
Tom Joad
Adam Curry
Orthicon Tube
Radio Detection Finder
Emporia State University
Large Hadron Collider
Strange references that seemed like a good idea but then go awry
The withering constraints of society
Tales from the Parental Basement
Dutch War of Independence

A Peek Into Page Views

Here are the numbers, the page views the blog has received over the last dozen years, broken out by months and years.

Total Page Views by Month/Year

And, if you want, the average daily page views.

Average Daily Page Views by Month/Year

You can see that the site remains in decline on this front, with 2018 threatening to have fewer page views than 2008, though with the uptick from Blaugust that seems to have held over into September, maybe the site can at least match 2008.

As noted above, you can see the decline in page views between January and February 2013, when Google changed how image search worked.

So Many Words

This is a new section that reflects a new feature added by WP.com. The stats page has an Insights section which has some bits and pieces of data. But last year they added the feature I was waiting for; word count.

At the ten year mark I was trying to estimate how many words I had posted over the life of the blog, but had no real basis on which to ground such a thing. Well, I could have opened up every single post and written down the word count, then added them up, but I wasn’t THAT interested in knowing the answer. So I called is somewhere between 250 and 500 words per post. As it turns out I was low in that estimate. 738 was closer to the mark. Anyway, this new chart will let you see all.

September 2018 – Word count, like, and comment numbers – Click on it to make it bigger/readable

I am so in love with this data. This is reason enough to favor WP.com over Blogger, at least for the numbers and stats part of my brain.

I have, of course, taken that chart and put it in a spreadsheet so I can get even more data out of it, such as the total number of words posted. (The chart does not include this post which already looks like it might be edging past 5,000 words.)

As you can see, my posts have become fewer but longer over time. I started out with close to 500 words per post, which is still kind of a lot, and moved on to being close to a thousand words with each post. There is one aspect of the blog that is not in decline; wordiness. But why the surge in verbosity over time?

I suspect I know the reason… or reasons.

First of all, my month in review posts make me go back and look at old posts. I started figuring out what I needed to include with posts to make them worth reading a year, five years, and ten years later. More narrative and description and context started to figure into posts.

Second, some regular posts, such as the month in review, started growing in size. My first month in review post back in September of 2006 was just over 500 words. The one for this past August was close to 2,500 words. All that looking back to past years has grown over time.

Third, I quote things wholesale these days. Daybreak puts out a press release on their site or a farewell note in the forums and I quote the whole damn thing. I’ve gone wanting for such documents at times, having simply linked to them only to find the company has attempted to memory hole them, as Daybreak did earlier this year when it suddenly decided it had never been owned by Eurasia. Now I have everything Daybreak or whoever said on the site in a post I can find. That will inflate the word count for a post.

Finally, I think in the “play vs. blog” balance, I have started to slide over to the blogging side more and more over the years. Weeks where I spend more time writing than playing video games are more and more common.

Probably the most concerning question brought up by that chart is what has happened to comments. For a seven year stretch the comments per post average was above seven. Then it dropped to around six for two years, then under five last year, and now it is barely three comments per post on average. What has happened?

Well, as we saw in the previous section, page views are down. Less people showing up means less people to comment. But with page views trending to 2008 levels, comments are way down from even there. So I do wonder where the comments have gone. Have I finally offended enough people to have an impact? Have may post gotten either more intelligent or more idiotic to the point that people don’t feel the need to comment? Am I just writing about dull topics?

I think the latter might enter into it. I don’t play or write about new games much anymore. I am well off the trends, hanging out with WoW, EVE, and Minecraft a lot of the time. If I were smart I would cater to search traffic… well, if I were looking for a way to boost comments. But while I like comments, more so than page views, it is tough to get myself to write about anything that I am not already set to do.

Still, I can take comfort in the fact that my likes per post have been trending up!

Internal Questions I Still Have over a Dozen Years Later

When I do a month in review post, should I use categories and tags for the games I discuss? I feel like I inflate category usage by doing that. But then again I do occasionally say something important… and not otherwise covered by a blog post that month… about the games I mentions.

Should month in review be on the last day of the month or the first day of the next month? I have chosen to keep it on the last day of the month so it is categorized with the rest of the month in the archives. Also, almost nothing I reference has any chance of changing between when I post and at the end of the actual day.

Should I stick with UTC as the time zone setting for the site? Back when I started the blog you were stuck with UTC. Later you could set your site to be on your own time zone. UTC doesn’t bother me, but it does mean my stats are offset by 8 hours. Would changing the time zone screw up my historical stats?

Where did those 23,134 page views go? When I add up all the page views in the tables below in the next section I get one number, but WP.com totals them up elsewhere as another number that happens to be 23,134 page views less. That is like a month from 2008… or 2018… gone missing.

If I italicize game and expansion names, should I also italicize the names of other blogs if I refer to them?

And why do I seem to start so many new paragraphs off with a conjunction?

Is it better to put a page break in a long post so it doesn’t take over the whole front page of the blog, or am I fine without a page break and letting all of the text just spill out in front of everybody?

Is it super capital or supercapital? Super carrier or supercarrier? Super-carrier? Blogroll or blog roll?

How many commas is too many? Should I just break this single, paragraph-long sentence into three or four more manageable sentences?

Has the ship pretty much sailed when it comes to the benefits of getting a custom URL? I worry if I get one I will lose traffic and then if I give it up later I will lose whatever traffic adapted to the first change.

Have I really not be able to come up with a better blog name to go with the “TAGN” acronym?

Would it really be so bad to take a week off once in a while?

The Inevitable Forward Looking Statement

Is there a point to this section anymore? I mean, besides padding this post past five thousand words mark.

I have a long established habit of claiming that, evidence to the contrary, this time I am going to actually write fewer blog posts and play more video games in exchange. I mean, I suppose I did see a dip in posts last year, but then I made it back up this year. But I am a bit afraid of that last question in the section above. If I took a week off… and I mean a real week off, not like in June when I went on a seven day cruise and still had five posts that week because I wrote them all in advance… I’m half afraid I would never come back. Part of what keeps me going at this is the fact that I haven’t stopped.

It seems more likely that, barring some major life change, the status quo will remain here at TAGN. There are days when I don’t feel like writing, but I always seem to love having written.

So thank you for stopping by now and again, and doubly so if you made it all the way down to the end here without skipping too much of the above. There will, as like as not, be another post tomorrow on some topic related to one video game or another. EVE Online seems the probable front runner.

Also, with that I have to think about a theme for the 13th anniversary. That number is considered unlucky by some, but it is practically the talisman of our family.

Has your appetite for pointless information been sated?