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Friday 17 April 2015

Three years of Ravalation


Ravalation is three years old. Hurray for me! I guess. I am two weeks too late with the celebration, but there was simply too much to write about. As confusing as blog anniversaries are (should I give out virtual cake or something?), I decided to write a post about it in the fashion I did with my blog's first anniversary. Prepare for a lot of navel-gazing. After all, isn't that what birthdays are all about?

A short history

  • My blog started off with this short post at March the 27th 2012.
  • I found my place in the gamer blog community during the Newbie Blogger Initiative (NBI) of that year, for which I'm still very grateful. Without it, I wouldn't have met many amazing people.
  • As I've mentioned briefly before, I became ill during the course of 2013, causing a period of less or no posts during my time of (partial) recovery.
  • I've started writing again since January the 15th of this year. While it's still hard for me to keep being positive at times, I think I've been doing okay.
  • 3 Years ago, I wrote about LotRO as my main game and SWTOR as my new game. Now, I write about SWTOR as my main game and Guild Wars 2 as my new game. Is Guild Wars going to be my new main game in the future? I honestly have no idea. I'm still having loads of fun in SWTOR.

Ravalation (f.l.t.r.) in 2012, 2013 and 2015.

Pageviews

Pageviews are sort of a taboo in the blogging world, because, oh, it's not all about the pageviews and if you talk about it you show your (un)popularity for everyone to see, oh noes etc.

Well, I found it fun to read back my 1st anniversary post and see how my blog was doing back then compared to now, so I'm going to ignore the taboo and write about it anyway. After all, it's not like I'm making money with my blog or am planning to do so. Maybe it'll even bring some insight or interesting observations for your own blogging. If it does, I'd love to read about it in the comments.

But first, some educational graphs (produced especially for you by the amazing Marinka):


Observation 1): not posting on your blog is bad for pageviews (eureka).
Observation 2): unless you don't have an audience yet, then it doesn't really matter how much you post (see the start of 2012) - although, of course, you'll never build one if you don't post at all.
Observation 3): although you can't see it very well in the graph anymore, the original NBI tripled my pageviews - thanks NBI.*
Observation 4): I've started following a blogging scheme, so hopefully my amount of posts per month won't go up and down as much anymore - no promises, though!

Ravalation has a total of 193,457 pageviews.

Recent popular posts

I've only included the posts I wrote since January 2015, because the list would look pretty much the same each year otherwise: the older posts obviously still accumulate pageviews. The post with the most pageviews of all time is still LOTRO: Should you play a loremaster? (7173 pageviews).

I think it's cool that it's a varied list containing posts about SWTOR, Guild Wars 2 and LOTRO. This means that you guys like reading about whatever game and not only like reading about, say, loremasters in LOTRO!

Disclaimer: this is not a loremaster, but elementalists are allowed nowadays, too.

Comments


I always think it's funny to compare the posts with most comments and most pageviews to each other, because they rarely overlap. My most viewed posts are always informative (how to do this or that in a game) or news related and barely have any comments. The 2015 winner in this regard is my most viewed number 2) (about SWTOR's Blood Hunt flashpoint), which actually wins the least comments contest by being my only blog post with 0 comments.

The blog posts with the most comments are usually more personal and opinionated. They cost a lot less time to make than informative articles and form the majority of my posts. I generally enjoy writing such posts more, although I think it's fun to have a mix of both types.

Hall of fame

As I just sort of revealed already, I'm a big fan of comments. I mean, pageviews don't really say anything: for all you know that's just an army of spammers passing by ("nah, this one isn't worth the bother, carry on"). But if I get a comment on a post I just wrote, my day is good.

So therefore hereby a special thank-you to the five top commenters of 2015:

I already gave Rakuno a honourary griffon for leaving so many comments last time and he seems to be determined to keep his spot. So this time, rather then give him another griffon, I'll post this hall of fame somewhere on my blog for a month. You guys certainly deserve the spotlight!

And of course I'd also like to thank everyone else who takes the time to visit and read my gibberish (yes, that would be you). On to the fourth year!

* This is a not-so-subtle product placement for the upcoming NBI-event: if you're a newish or wannabe gamer blogger, be sure to participate in this year's event in May. There's an introductionary Twitter event going on next week (check the calendar on the website).

14 comments :

  1. Three years! Congratulations. I like to read your thoughts on the games I play and those I don't. You've the gift of making them all seem fun. Must go back and read a couple of those posts you mention...Cheers to the next three years!

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  2. Congratulations! :) Like Atherne I also do enjoy your thoughts on games... Although I admit I tend to keep only to games I know something about.... Which is kinda ironic considering I never really played LoTRO much beyond the shire and even then I read your posts about it. SWTOR is pretty much the same thing and yet I haven't read many of your posts about it to be honest. Go figures!

    Still love your blog and my intention is to still haunt your comments area for a long time yet. :)

    P.S.: I should totally change my blogging name to that. Then I could also adopt an edgy and ironic attitude with every other sentence ending with lol. I am pretty sure that will make me very popular in the internetz!

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  3. Happy anniversary! Egads, three years? Gefeliciteerd and here's to many more. :)

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  4. Congratulations on your 3 year anniversary! Okay, I'll admit...I tend to only read the SWTOR and personal posts. Have been looking at GW2 though but FFXIV stole my attention....

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    1. Thanks! I've seen many people write about FFXIV and the screenshots look amazing. I'd totally want to try it if I wouldn't be juggling three MMOs already.

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  5. Congratulations on three years! I also always find blog stats interesting... and woo for getting commenter silver medal! :P

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    1. Oh, and I'm incredibly impressed that you only have one blog post that received zero comments, ever. That is pretty amazing.

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    2. The silver medal is totally earned! ;) I'm always glad to see a comment by you, especially on those obscure hardcore raiding posts. :)

      And I impressed you falsely, because it's only the 2015 posts I looked at for this anniversary post! For 2015 Blood Hunt was indeed the only post without comments, but the only one ever... I wish! I looked through my blog's history and found many, especially from the early days of my blog.

      Behold my list of shame:

      2012
      LOTRO/Mass Effect/SWTOR: October update
      SWTOR: Persuing the matrix
      Mass Effect 2: The highlights
      LOTRO: On steeds and shades of the past
      Change of scenery: planting plants to shoot zombies
      LOTRO: The art of burning things
      SWTOR: Legacy update
      Mass Effect 1: Plants plus zombies
      SWTOR: Everything blue

      2013
      SWTOR: Flavour of the month
      SWTOR: Busy, small and furry
      First glance at the Elder Scrolls Online
      SWTOR: Epic lightsaber battles (2)

      2014
      Mass Effect 3: Omega DLC

      I've changed the post text a bit so it's hopefully clearer that it's only about the 2015 posts. Sorry for the confusion.

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  6. Congrats on 3 years! Looking forward to reading many more posts :)

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  7. Thank you all for the kind congratulations. You guys are the best!

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  8. Way to Go Rav! 3 Years is a very solid run, especially with the amount of people that have dropped by. Keep up the good work and fun posts!

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    1. Oh, using my old mhorgrim address because for some reason, my wordpress name/address isn't allowing me to publish. Anyways, it's Mhorgrim from over at For A Few Credits more.

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    2. Thanks for the kind words. And I'm really sorry for Blogger being annoying with Wordpress comments. I know you sometimes have to copy your comment because it eats it and just logs you in with Wordpress if you're not already logged in beforehand. I don't know why it didn't let you comment at all with it, though, maybe another bug for users that are already logged in to Blogger? Not much I can do about it other than installing a whole new commenting system, but I'm not sure I want to go down that road. :/

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