Casual Raid Leader

Well… It was bound to happen.  I’m actually shocked in some respects that I made it here.  This folks is all about statistics.  I’ve seen lots of ways people do this, but I’m going to spend a little time sharing some statistics and also discussing what you’re going to see moving forward here.

Welcome to post number 130.  For those who didn’t discern from the post title, this is my one year anniversary.  I find it interesting.  I had a goal when I first started the blog to hopefully post at least once every three days.    Pretty damned close… 365 days in a year… 129 posts… almost exactly 1/3.  Give me a holiday or two in there and I’m dead on.

Some weeks at the beginning I got pretty much 5 days a week of posting.  Those are the early days.  Those are when you’ve got a million ideas.  You’re just pumping things out one after the other and I’d hazard to say you probably miss a great deal on quality, but you’ve got sooo much flowing through your head that you can just pump out a metric ton of content.

On Progression

I think as this last year has progressed I’ve learned a great deal about writing.  I’ve learned about my own creative process and what works for me.  I’ve learned a lot about what doesn’t work for me too.  I’ve tried… and failed to start any number of projects.  Plenty of things just plain didn’t get done.  Others I started with visions of doing something silly like one post a day for two weeks to get all classes covered in raiding… well….  ok that was a stupid idea…

Other ideas I went into and suddenly realized… um… oops… Wrath is almost out…that won’t mean jack in about 2 months.  Other things over time have helped kind of shape where I’ve gone. 

Over that time I’ve actually reached kind of an epiphany.  I had a vision when I started this blog.  I still do actually, but what I failed to do was deliver fully on that vision.  I’ve made progress towards it, but a lot of what I had envisioned kind of got lost in the initial excitement of just plain writing.  So… we’ll come back to that.

Relevant Stats

The blog opened on July 21st, 2008.  Originally the blog was posted over at blogger.  It was a free hosted blog and to be honest it took me less than two weeks to decide that I really wanted to do something self hosted.  So in August I moved the blog over to this site.  This is a self hosted Wordpress blog. 

One year later I’ve put in 129 posts and had 469 actual real life comments.  In that time I could give you some amazing stats on spam if I’d bothered to install a spam filter for the first few months.  However since I installed a spam filter its caught over 2400 spam messages.  Which is probably what Matticus averages over at World of Matticus in a month or a week.  Which is fine by me for the moment.

I was a bad boy… I probably wandered through the first 4-5 months of my blogging career.  Honestly I never really thought much about stats till I got to my first time ever being linked on Wow.com (formerly WowInsider).  That particular blog post was one of my submissions for a shared topic at Blog Azeroth called, “The Children of Wrath”.  It was a catchy title and one that has kind of coined  a phrase for the people who started the game in this expansion.  It was then that I first realized I really wanted to see the stats.

For those who aren’t aware, Blog Azeroth is a great community of Bloggers.  Its a great way to get a start.  Even if you aren’t sure you ever want to run a blog, its a great place to run over, log into their forums and start to just ask questions about blogging. 

On an average month we get around 3,000 views.  On special months where Wow.com links here twice in a month we got over 11,000 views.  In fact the second time Wow.com linked here I ended up discovering the joys of a little called “WP Super Cache”.  I went from having my server brought to its knees to suddenly being able to almost instantly load pages… I highly recommend it for anyone with a self hosted Word Press blog.

Highlights

Well I think there are a lot of things that I’m proud of writing.  I’m happy I got to help support the Blog Azeroth community in my early days.  I’ve since had some serious issues at work that really limited my time and I’ve drifted out of touch with that community.  So hopefully in the next year I can get a bit more involved again.  Since my blog has such a unique focus, its been a little tough to just throw in some of the shared topics that they do just because they feel a little out of place here on the site most times.

For my top posts for the year, in terms of the ones that people actually read on a regular basis are:

1. Self Improvement Through Negative Feedback *Linked on Wow.com*
2. Get Your Buff On – Food Glorious Food *Linked a LOT from the Pink Pigtail Inn…. Larisa, what do you do over there *
3. Encouraging Organic Raiding *Linked from Wow.com*
4. Get Your Buff On – Food Glorious Food Redux
5. Children of Wrath: Dawn of a New Generation *Linked from Wow.com*

Top Referrers for the last year of which I’m extremely grateful for their links:

1. Wow.com
2. The Pink Pigtail Inn
3. Tank Like a Girl
4. Twisted Nether Blog Cast Wiki
5. Just My Two Copper

Looking Forward

Well that’s just enough of looking back.  Lets talk about looking forward.  In an effort to kind of “tune” the content I’m going to be refocusing the blog a little this year.  I’ve found that while I do enjoy writing more editorial comment stuff, I think I’d like to blog to focus back toward its original goal in my mind.  So with that in mind I’m going to start with a face lift.  Over the next week I’m going to be testing out some new themes and trying to find one that I really like. 

The second thing I’m going to be doing is refocusing on some set content pieces.  So what I’m going to attempt to do is the following:

• One day a week of a review of a tool/add on relevant to raid leaders or raiders. 
• One day a week of a review/recommendation on a resource site that can be helpful for a raid leader or a raider to access.  The goal will be to provide a summary of sites you can start to use in your raid leading career.
• One day per week of some sort of editorial type writing on a topic relevant to raid leading.
• One raid cheat sheet per week complete and up to date.  Its a project I started and I intend to finish.

For the short term that’s where I’m refocussing my efforts.  I may look at bringing on other raid leaders and raiders to write as the year progresses, but I’m really looking to bring it back to  center and start making this more of a resource site.

I want to send a big shout out to the people who’ve stuck with me and read all this year.  Its you people who help keep me going.  I’m hoping as we evolve the site that you can start to get more involved, send in suggestions, send in ideas of things you’d like to see as well as making the comments more interactive.  *Salute*

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 6:13 am and is filed under Administrative Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.