Monthly report: January 2006

Two thousand and six! Whatta year. Another thirty-and-one days gone by, and naturally enough, that means another monthly report, chockablock with uninteresting statistics, reminiscences of days gone by so recently that you haven’t had time to forget them, and of course, everyone’s favorite: goofy search strings. Hold on to your hats, be they homburg or cloche…

In December, I reported that approximately 12,000 enlightened souls visited the blog. This month, I’m pleased to report that 19,500 presumably slightly-more-benighted ones did. On January 25th there were in fact almost 4800 visitors, thanks to Zonk Slashdotting a fairly inconsequential post. Generally speaking, though, the number of visits saw a healthy trend upwards, and for the latter half of the month ran in the mid-2000’s every day.

In fact, the trajectory of everything is up, up, up. Bandwidth included. At this rate, 80,000 more readers (or five more posts as bandwidth-intensive as “Moore’s Wall”) and I might have to upgrade my hosting package.

In my pointless crusade to drive more people to listen to my music, I have succeeded in getting 328 of you to see the Flash plugin, and 73 of you to listen to an MP3 file. To be specific, 52 people listened to “Bicycles in January” and 18 more to the putative sonata that were posted this month. More of you bothered to look at the ancient ancient UO art that’s mostly not in the game anymore. What’s wrong with you people?

The most popular pages on the site this month: (you can compare to last month’s list, if you want):

1. Moore’s Wall (#1 with a bullet, didn’t chart last month)
2. The Laws of Online World Design (holding at #2)
3. Small Worlds (up for #4)
4. The Online Worlds Timeline (the former #1)
5. Running Massively Multiplayer Games
   (up from #9)

6. How to Manage a Large-Scale Online Gaming Community (up from #7)
7. About Raph (which still needs updated!! Slipping one spot…)
8. The Destiny of Online Worlds (down from #5)
9. What Does It Take to Make a Successful Persistent Online World (appearing on the charts in its debut!)
10. Online World Design Patterns (down from #3)

Alas, Declaring the Rights of Players fell off the charts this month, as did the Content creation snippet.

Stuff nobody gave a damn about: the improvised live short story “Sugarheart” (3 people! Thank you, thank you!) and the “brief history” chapter in Insubstantial Pageants (One guy. Yay!).

Last month, the most popular post was Do Levels Suck?. It has been dethroned by a post that will now continue to sit at the top of the charts forever even though it has virtually no content of mine in it. Clearly, the future of traffic is in reblogging. 🙂

1. OGLE (5018)
2. Do levels suck? (4857)
3. Where does popularity come from, or the Wisdom of Crowds revisited (2837)
4. Do levels suck? Part II (2557)
5. The evil we pretend to do (2176)
6. Forcing interaction (1731)
7. From instancing to worldy games (1554)
8. Innovation, evolution, and adaptation (1416)
9. Moore’s Wall (1390)
10. The future of content (1344)

These figures don’t include feeds, of course.

I am perplexed over the 2300 people who decided that levels sucked or not after only reading half of it. 🙂

As usual, the posts that caused the most discussion in January were different than the most visited posts.

1. Iteration in games: a mini-rant
2. Are MMORPG’s Games? (and the discussion is still going!)
3. Moore’s Wall
4. Innovation, evolution, and adaptation
5. OGLE (stupid thing…)
6. One of the worst things about a bad cold… (which is just sad)
7. The Daedalus Project: Yi-Shan-Guan (not bad for a two-sentence post!)
8. ACM Sandbox Symposium — which goes to show that what people really want to talk about is SWG.
9. Treating players like numbers
10. What Play Style Do You Prefer? (bedcause quizzes are always popular on the Net)

Firefox: 42.5%. IE: 41.8%. The struggle continues, in these twilight days of empire, as the downtrodden people groan under the yoke of endless browser wars. Soon shall arise in the West a new King, foretold by the sages. Or not. Meanwhile, almost 7% of you are on Macs!

How did you get here?

1. Slashdot
2. Fires of Heaven forums, which is annoying because I keep looking for the posts that are pointing here, and I can’t find anything recent.
3. Metafilter
4. The guy formerly known as Lum
5. Evil Avatar, which surely does not bode well.
6. Blue’s News, which probably made a crack about SWG when it linked. Just guessing, mind you.
7. f13. I’ve run out of jokes about these guys.
8. Robot Wisdom, which looks like a massive list of links updated constantly.
9. Amit’s Game Programming Page, still going strong after all these years
10. Gamasutra, because Jim Rossignol is apparently getting paid to read blogs.

Popular searches using the blog’s search engine included “about at ree” (type slower, kids! There’s no excuse for searching for this five times…!); “character traits for a hero,” (um, nobility, self-sacrifice, bravery, and uh, heroism?); lots of people wanting my email address or phone number; lots of people looking for “innovation” — hey, me too, me too; a lot of searches for “mmo” which probably returned almost the whole site; and zillions of searches for NGE and SWG, which explains why you don’t find the aforementioned email address and phone number.

My favorite searches from the Web this month:

• random text flat files. I would think these would be easy to find on the Web. Have you tried Geocities?
• oies et renards jeux. Oui.
• 24 season 4 deleted scenes. I would think these would be easy to find on the Web. Have you tried Geocities?
• little known facts about jack bauer. I would think… oh, never mind. There were dozens of other searches for Jack, of course.
• carol macgillivray. Who? Worse, how did four searches lead here?
• good essays. Ah, a vote of approval.
• videos of men taking woman and raping them. I think that’s beyond even Geocities.
• my personal website. Hmm, if you have to Google for it, I don’t know what to tell ya.
• women ripping clothes. What, just like that? “Take that, shirt! RRRIIIP! Die, sock!”
• renaissance poetry. Forsooth.
• sankuokai — I knew obscure Japanese TV shows would pay off in traffic!
• why human beings pretend — honey, if I knew the answer to that…
• very scantily clad young women. Yeah, back to Geocities.
• raph koster villain. MU HAHHA HAAH HA HAH HAH AHHAHAHHA HA!
• what do men see as sexually appealing in women. I would think it would be obvious, but you could try asking one, instead of asking Google.
• online hearts game gertrude stein. All I can figure is that someone had English class homework to do, and wanted to procrastinate, and somehow forgot to do two separate search queries.
• french attack. If they do, Jack Bauer will stop them.
• cat shaped poem. I’m tempted to try to write one.
• black pus. Definitely Geocities.
• how to tackle selfish people. Violently. Jack knows how.
• A lot of people looking for the chords to “Blow ‘Em Away” by Chuck Brodsky. You can buy it in David Wilcox’s book of tabs, since he covered it.
• krusty nicotine patch picture. Eww.
• why are men so grouchy when they turn 50. Well, I could speculate, but I’m only 34.
• how do we keep civilization from destroying itself. Let me know if you find the answer.
• very weird people — now, that, you can clearly stop searching for.

So there you go. I know you were all waiting breathlessly for this all month. Lucky for you, February is a short month, so you won’t have to wait as long next time.

You may now proceed with your standard “open thread” non-discussion. Unless you want to talk about SWG. 😛