Four years of Ravalation

It's already been four years since I started this blogging adventure! In good Ravalation tradition, I'm a few weeks late for my blogoversary, but that's not going to stop me from celebrating. Blogging takes a lot of my spare time, and I find myself so busy writing new articles that I forget what I've written in the past. So it's a lot of fun for me to look back and see how my blog has evolved, and maybe even learn something from it.

For this special occasion, my friend Marinka and I went all "for science!" and have used Ravalation's statistics as a test case to explore if there is a scientifically verifiable connection between the amount of posts written and the pageviews received (nerd alert). The best part: we found the answer! Yup, it's another of those posts where you'll have to suffer through reading about the woes of a blogger girl before you get to the part where you find out!

Looking back

The first thing that I realized when I reread my previous anniversary posts is that I haven't changed a single thing about my blog's design this year. I guess this means that I've finally found a format I can bear the sight of! Although there are things I would change about my blog if my coding skills would allow it, I'm happy with the banner and the orokeet icon, both of which I hope are recognizable.

This is the first year I've followed a posting schedule of some sort, and it has definitely payed off. 2015 was my year with the highest number of posts ever: 96; this year already has 17 posts: more than I wrote in the whole of 2014! Fashion Friday and 5 Fandom Friday helped a lot by bringing structure to my posts: even if time or creativity was low, I could at least post those. Sometimes it was challenging to bend 5 Fandom Friday topics to a gaming theme, but more often than not they created interesting angles to gaming.

This fourth year was also one of community challenges. I enjoyed IntPiPoMo, the (still ongoing) 6 on 6 challenge and Murf's Screenshot Safari in particular, because they revolved around one of my favourite things in gaming: collecting pretty screenies. I was super proud to have won the Screenshot Safari in two categories!

Juggernaut Neserys, winner in the category Heroes or Villains.	Ravanel and bear in Forochel, winner in the category The Best LOTRO Screenshot.

I also intentionally wrote more personal posts this year. Belghast of Tales of the Aggronaut inspired me: his daily posts often contain some analogue life thoughts that I enjoy reading a lot, yet I find myself writing strictly about games by default. Blending my analogue life in my writing is not something that comes naturally to me, but I wanted to work on this skill. And thus you got to read Liebster posts, about the travels of Nora (meeting fellow gamers) and my adventures while studying abroad in Sweden. I even posted some pictures of real life me on the blog - I know it doesn't sound like much, but for the inherently shy me it was a big step. 

Finally, the past year was also one of many firsts. I experimented with new types of posts, such as my first giveaway (which was a huge success, as you'll see in the stats below) and a super inspiring collaboration with Noctua of Gamers Decrypted, who wrote the first guest post on Ravalation and with whom I did a series of twin posts on guild leadership afterwards. I remember vividly how nervous I was for interviewing guild leaders for the guild leadership posts - another first. Guesting on Constant Warfare's stream was also a step out of my comfort zone, but it was a lot of fun. In December, I did a holiday card swap via snail mail. It was amazing to get to know fellow bloggers and readers this way, and get awesome cards from fellow geeks. It also made me pick up drawing again. Because of this blog, I rediscovered how therapeutic drawing is for me during difficult periods of my life.

Obligatory pretty graphs

With the aid of the by the now infamous statistics guru Marinka, I have some interesting graphs to share. Fun fact: Ravalation has a total of 309,270 pageviews.

1) Pageviews and amount of posts per month on Ravalation (2012-2016)

Some observations:

a) A connection between amount of posts and pageviews is suggested
Apart from in 2012 (when I wrote a lot of posts but nobody had discovered my blog yet) the pageviews and amount of posts per month seem to be following a similar trend. Of course there are more variables than how many posts one writes influencing the amount of pageviews, most of them harder to quantify: post quality and external links on popular websites (Reddit, Massively OP and going viral on Twitter are examples for Ravalation) are things that come to mind. There are equations to calculate the correlation between pageviews and amount of posts, which is what we will do later on in this post!

b) There seems to be some delay between amount of views compared to amount of posts
The delay sometimes consists of several months, which I found puzzling. Marinka suggests this is because people start checking Ravalation expecting posts on certain days (for instance Monday, Wednesday and Friday, my intended schedule) once they find out I'm actively writing again. Which brings me to the last observation.

c) My amount of posts written per month vary a lot
If Marinka is right (and she very well may be), I could be reaching a lot more people with my posts if I would start writing very regularly on the same week days. Unfortunately, a posting schedule of three times a week proved impossible to keep up at times (sometimes my analogue life demands more attention). But it could be an interesting experiment to follow a very strict schedule for a year (Mondays and Fridays - with Wednesdays as a bonus when I have unusually much time or inspiration). Then, next year, I can test this hypothesis by comparing to the data above.

I'm not making any promises, but it is something I'm considering. I do like a good challenge!

2) Correlation between pageviews and the amount of posts 2012-2016 (regression analysis)

Now it's time to put the nerd glasses on. Using Excel, mastermind Marinka managed to construct a scatterplot visualizing the correlation between the amount of pageviews and blog posts written.

If you're not familiar with these type of plots: generally speaking, the more the dots are spread out over the area, the lower the variety registered can be explained by the relation between the two factors. In plot 2) above, the dots are pretty much all over the screen. There is barely any relationship between the amount of blog posts and pageviews.

It gets exciting when we take 2012 (the year in which I was still building an audience) out of the equation:

3) Correlation between pageviews and the amount of posts 2013-2016 (regression analysis)

All of a sudden, we see that the dots are way more clustered. The formula shows that more than 40% of the variation is explained by the correlation between blog posts and pageviews. This is a pretty high number when it comes to statistics. In the formula, x represents the amount of blog posts per month; 4510.5 represents the number of base pageviews. In other words: even if I don't write any blog posts at all, an average amount of 4510.5 visits to my blog per month are made.

The conclusion: there is indeed a scientifically verifiable positive relationship between the amount of posts written per month and the amount of pageviews.

Top commenters

Time for an intermezzo before you pass out from an overdose of maths. I love reading the comments on my posts, even though I don't always find the time to reply to them all (sorry about that!) and, honestly, kind of suck at them. Despite all this, more than 75 different people visited Ravalation the past year and left the dazzling total amount of 906 comments. (Okay, probably half of them is me responding to you guys, but I was flabbergasted when I found out.)

Through all the experiences we've shared I've come to think of some of you as friends and I feel honoured that people stick around - for years even, in some cases. In appreciation, here's a top 5 of the most avid commenters of the past year on Ravalation.

Now I know what you're thinking. This is where we sit back and wait for XxMLG_R4kun0_Noscope420xX to walk away with another griffon. But this year the unimaginable happened (gasp):

Ravalation's Top 5 Commenters of Awesome

Rakuno was in his element, typing away blog post-lengthy comments on Ravalation instead of posting on his own blog - business as usual. But then, out of left field, a wild Shintar appears and beats Rakuno by three comments! The crowd goes wild!

Jokes aside, you should totally check out the blogs of these awesome people: Shintar from Going Commando (59), Rakuno of Shards of Imagination (56), Redbeard of Parallel Context (43), Mhorgrim of For A Few Credits More (22), Rowan Blaze from I Have Touched the Sky and Ashlee from Her Geekery (21).

Thank you guys so much for making blogging the rewarding experience it is!

More pretty graphs

We're almost at the end of this post, but first some final pretty graphs...

Don't worry, no complicated statistics anymore: these are some graphs presenting my most popular blog posts. It makes me happy to see you guys liked reading and talking about a wide range of subjects.

Top 5 of most read posts: 1) SWTOR speeder giveaway (closed); 2) Knights of the Fallen Empire (part 2): overhyped?; 3) Why do we 'troll'?; 4) Thoughts on LOTRO's server closures; 5) How would you do as a guild master?

Top 5 of posts with the most comments: 1) SWTOR speeder giveaway (closed); 2) Creatively double-Liebsterized; 3) Six times blue; 4) Warning: screenies incoming; 5) Gamer girl

What about myself? I find it very hard to rank my own posts, but here are three I am especially happy with (in no particular order):

• The day on which virtual people made me cry: I felt a bit ashamed to admit how hard a certain event in Lord of the Rings Online made me cry, but the topic intrigued me. It was heart-warming to hear I was not alone in this.
• Gamer girl: I wanted to explore what the term "gamer girl" meant to me: I wasn't sure, and I think I still am not! I loved the discussion that this article brought up; 
• The quest for a home: the Lund edition: I was struggling to find a format that would tell about my misadventures abroad in Sweden without making it whiny. I'm pretty happy with my solution to present my analogue life experiences as if it was my avatar playing the MMO called "real life". 

Is there a post you liked in particular last year? What topics do you enjoy reading about? I'd love to hear!