(Riotous Cheering)
Thank you, thank you. . .
I'd like to report to you that, today on the Dawn of 2018, the State of the Blogs is good.
(Applause).
We saw all time viewing records this year, peaking out at 55,954 views in the month of March alone. That was a peak however, and it matched the end of the posts on the Punitive Expedition. After a steady rise in March, 2016, that coincided with our commencement of posts about the Punitive Expedition, which saw readership jump up to nearly 5,000 views in a month, readership really took off and steady climbed until that month. As a result, this blog has now had over 560,000 total views.
Of course, it's dropped off like a stone, somewhat, since then, which was expected. After March, readership was down to 10,000 views per month by June, still pretty respectable by the historic standards of this blog, but way, way down. However, for some odd reason, it had doubled to 20,000 views per month by October, fell to 12,000 the next month, before going to the second highest readership of all time last month, 38,000. Weird. It's expected to drop way off in 2018. My guess is that we'll be luck to get 200 views a day, and a lot of days right now it's down that low or lower.
Part of the reason is that we're past most of the daily entries about the Punitive Expedition, which have been followed by frequent ones about World War One. These will not be coming nearly as fast, we think, as the slice of life aspect of these depart a bit . But we suspect they will. And that will likely result in fewer posts.
Indeed, the pace of posting has already declined this past week as we move towards this new phase, or perhaps somewhat return a bit to the older original one (okay, we've said that before). Indeed, the tally of posts over the years tells its own story in these regards:
As we've noted here before, this blog had an earlier version, so the tallies are more than a bit off (including the tally of readership hits), but this tells its own tale. Posting here really began to pick up when we killed off that earlier blog, took a hiatus from posting, and then picked up posting here. But we've simply been writing more. This year nearly matched last year, but it was higher. The year before that saw an increase in posts that was quite significant, although 2015 was actually down from 2014. Chances are pretty high that 2018 will drop down from 2017 and 2017 is likely to cap out as the all time high in terms of posts here. Having said that, 2018 is another election year, like 2016 was, that contributed to a lot of posts being made here.
The Somme viewed from the air, January 19, 1917
For reasons that aren't clear to us, this is the most viewed thread on the site, having received 5,293 views.
Lex Anteinternet, our most diverse blog, is only one of our several blogs, of course, and looking at them tells a different tale. Our older blog, Holscher's Hub, was way down in posts over historic highs:
Indeed, it was at its lowest ever, if we discount the inaugural year of 2011. We hope to see more posts there this year. It hit its historic highly monthly viewing, however, last month, at 3,000 views . . which suggest it was something on the net, rather than our brilliant content,t hat contributed to that. Once the most viewed of our blogs, it stands today at a respectable 64,533 total views, which increase at the rate of about 1,000 or so a month, surprisingly, given the low posting rate there.
Today In Wyoming's History should be way down, but oddly it isn't. This may be because when we started updating this post nearly daily due to the Punitive Expedition we linked those posts to Wyoming newspapers to try to give a Wyoming flavor and Wyoming view to those posts. More particularly, we wanted to try to explore, as part of the original purpose of this blog, what it was like for Wyomingite's in 1916 when things tarted hearing up on the Mexican border in a major way. As we did that, we linked those items into Today In Wyoming's History and updated a lot of entries, indeed sometimes on a daily basis. Beyond that we posted some new items as well. We kept that up to an extent in 2017 as we posted newspaper items and daily events concerning 1917.
Perhaps in part because of that, the readership steadily claimed all year and peaked at over 6,000 views last month, although as we've been noting here it seems that a lot of that was due to net activity. Today In Wyoming's History now has over 114,000 views, making it the second most viewed of our blogs.
New Mexicans In Wyoming
Most recent original entry on Today In Wyoming's History.
Churches of the West, which has historically stood next in line, also saw a big decline in postings this past year:
Quite the drop off, but then this one drops around a lot. As its based on my travel for work, it doesn't get much new if I keep traveling to the same places. And frankly, I've run out of subjects in Wyoming to post to it, almost. At over 71,000 views, it stands in second place to this blog for readership and jumps around wildly from month to month, getting between 1,500 views and 2,500 views per month.Immaculate Conception Church, Rapid City South Dakota
A portion of the most popular thread on Churches of the West at 3,696 views.
Again, as t his is a travel based blog, this reflects the fact that last year I rarely went to a location that I hadn't photographed before or, if I was in an unfamiliar place, I just didn't' have time to take photos (an increasingly common work phenomenon). So, not much going on there. I'm amazed that the blog has 26,000 total views.
Lawrence County Courthouse. Speerfish South Dakota.
Last post of the year for Courthouses of the West.
Painted Bricks is the first of our specialty blogs here about structures. It originally was focused on a single location, but rather obviously branched out pretty quickly. It's readership has always been low, but it saw a surprising hike last month as well, and also in August (probably due to the eclipse). It usually is the least active of the specialty blogs, but last year it was not, which doesn't mean it was very active:
Somehow its managed to receive nearly 28,000 views.Hotel Virginia (Natrona County Annex), Casper Wyoming
Most popular, and now out of date, post on Painted Bricks with 1,029 views.
A revived blog, The Aerodrome, focusing on aircraft, is in at over 7,000 total views and its just a few months old. Half of that came in December, suggesting that net activity had more to do with its total readership so far than any other single cause. We like airplanes, so we hope to see more activity here.
Maybe Berlin Airlift Rates were achieved.
Part of the Eclipse post at The Aerodrome, our most recent blog, or not.
Our other transportation blog, Railhead, remained about as active, which isn't much, as always:
Sunrise Train, Torrington Wyoming
Last post of the year for Railhead
This is frankly surprising as this is also a travel based blog. I'm amazed that there were fifteen posts on it last year. I"m also amazed that it has had a grand total of 32,000 views.
Finally, there's our low activity blog on war memorials. Well, that blog, Some Gave All, is now on memorials of all types, showing how everything here expands all the time. It's also travel based and highly opportunistic, meaning that I pick things up for that blog as I pass them, and I pass by things I could photograph constantly, and I do mean constantly. Given that, the fact that its totals every year remain about the same is not too surprising:
It has 47,550 total views, which is really surprising.
Veterans Memorial, Ft. Laramie Wyoming
Snippet of the last post of the year from Some Gave All.
Well, we can't really say "finally", as we took a run at expanding out the number of blogs a bit to reflect the somewhat bogus expansion of some of the existing one. Along those lines, we planned oan Churches of the South and Churches of the East. We have the URLs for both, but only the East has been posted.
Churches of the West: Anglican Church of the Holy Trinity, Toronto Ontario
Not much is going on there yet, and for good reason. Every photo posted there is already posted elsewhere. Whether this activity will be worth doing is yet to be seen.
So, the state of the blogs is good, and we've received a lot of viewership this year. We'd guess that it'll never be anywhere near as high in any one year as it has been for 2017, and that's okay. We'd also guess that the posting rate will be down, and indeed if you tally all the blogs up together, it already is. But that's okay too.
Thanks for stopping in and reading our entries from time to time. We appreciate it.
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