The Paper Anniversary

One year ago today,  I uploaded the first post to this blog.  Hard to believe that it's been a year since I first welcomed people aboard this little bragfest about my hobby.  It's perhaps even harder to believe that people keep coming back, and some have even signed on to follow my ramblings about toy sailing ships.  A tip of the bicorne  to all of you who come by, even if you don't leave comments.  I assure you, all of your visits are appreciated.

There have been a few visitors, to be sure.  As of 3/06/2018, there have been 8,483 visitors to the blog.  Unfortunately, the Blogger statistics do not separate out my views from everyone else, so I know some of those are mine but not how many.  What the Blogger stats do tell me is where the visitors come from, and that is quite interesting.  Most pageviews come from the US, as you might expect, followed by the UK and Belgium respectively, with Australia coming in fourth place and Ireland at fifth.  Interestingly enough, the audience is evenly split between English speaking countries and other ones.  Poland is sixth on overall pageviews, Spain is seventh, Germany is eighth and France comes in at tenth place.  If you look at the monthly or weekly breakdowns, then things get really interesting.  For the month of February 5 to March 6 2018,  I had 20 pageviews from Switzerland.  That is probably the one I least expected, as even the 19 visits from Russia could be because I posted photos of my Russian ships.

Another thing the stats let me see is which posts are the most popular for a given period. As of 3/06/2018, the most popular post contains the photos of my French fleet, with 245 views.  What's interesting though, is that the second most popular post are my thoughts about getting into ACW ironclads.  That one has 220 views.  Of the other posts in the top 10, 4 of them are from the "What Is My Time Worth?" series that I did about how long it takes to build a ship.  In terms of popularity, those are ranked below:

  4) Part 7: Final Thoughts
  5) Part 5: Standing Rigging
  9) Part 4: Painting and Installing the Masts
10) Part 2: Fitting and Filing

I'm not too sure why those entries out of the seven made the top ten, and so will just leave it right there.  I'd certainly appreciate any opinions in the comments.

While I appreciate everyone who visits the blog (as I said earlier), there are some people out there that I owe an extra thanks to.  At the time of this posting, I have a total of 5 followers.  Now, I know that's not a lot compared to other people.  However, I'm impressed that there are 5 people out there who enjoy my scribbling enough to actually sign up for them, as opposed to just dropping by now and again.  I would name them, but I think there might be 1 or 2 that wouldn't appreciate it.  So, let me raise a toast to my 5 followers:   .  You really are appreciated more than you can imagine.

For this coming year, I will be adding a page with reviews of books that I think are useful for Age of Sail gamers.  There will also be a page on how squadrons maneuver, using the Post Captain rules as a basis.  I also need to finally get pictures of the British fleet up, while playing more games and taking photos of them.  Of course, pictures of my new ships as they are built are just a given.

I hope that everyone has enjoyed this brief peek under the hood of how the blog has done this last year.  If anyone has questions that I didn't answer or touch on, feel free to ask me in the comments and I will do my best to answer them.