20,000 views

Another milestone has been reached by the blog recently, on Tuesday, to be exact. The bog has now had over 20,000 views since I started posting, about 3 years ago. Ok, so compared to some blogs this is nothing special but for me, I think it is. Now, I've said it quite a few times, i'm not in this to make my fortune or become famous, I do this for the love of it and to share my thoughts, ideas and models with the other like minded people but I do feel a certain sense of pride that people are spending the time to read and comment on my blog. I'm not going to go in to great depth with the numbers on this occasion, as I have do in the past, mostly as I don't really have the time to either write the posts or the space/time to post them, especially not with the new Guard codex coming out this weekend! Mine is ordered and hopefully should be here Saturday or Monday, more likely Monday. Either way, I plan on getting up various posts over the following weeks, reviewing the codex and the various units and changes. With that review and also the fact that I haven't posted anything about the Eagle Knights, who have been quietly coming together in the background and are moving towards complete fairly rapidly. Anyway, let have a look at some of the numbers shall we.

With the blog hitting 20,000 views I had a look back at when I hit some of the other milestones and was quite surprised. It took 10 months to go from 2500 views to 10,000 views, but only 5 months to go from the 10 to 20 thousand mark. The reason for this is quite obvious really and that is joining the Natfka Blog Exchange. When I went on to Google+, my views jumped from the 10's to the 100's a month, but when I went on to the blog exchange, it jumped from a couple of hundred a month to holding around 2000 a month. One of the things that people have said in the past, is that if I put things up on the more specific Google+ groups, rather than just on the basic public pages and if I join up with reddit and the likes, I could push the views up even further. However, being as lazy as I am, I haven't bothered and probably wont. Google+ and Natfka are easy and require no effort on my part, which I like. In the future I may push things further or if anyone knows of any systems that will do all this for me, then i'll look at them but for the moment, I think i'll just stick with the easy stuff.

The pictures seem slightly fuzzy to me, I think it's because I used the phones capture system and then cropped them. It doesn't seem to like this and I may have to try and do it on the laptop next time, although i'm not planning on the next update until I hit 50,000, so it may be a while.

First up, is last weeks viewing figures. it seems that my 8th edition posts are getting most of the attention, which isn't a surprise, 8th is still new and there is lots of stuff floating around and new developments. When I start on the new codex, I expect this to dominate the weekly viewing figures. Oh, and i'm up to 4 followers! that's double the number I had last time I looked!

 The overall figures also show that 8th is popular, with the top two posts having nearly 2500 views between them! I was really excited when one of my posts topped the 100 views mark and I was not expecting any post to hit the 1000 views mark for a long time but it appears that the 8th edition posts have been really popular.

This is the top 10 posts and pages and as you can see, all but one post, the painting - Pre or Post?, is related to 8th. Now, there seems to be something going on with the posts, as last time, my Sternhammer post was sitting on 102 views, but now is nowhere to be found, despite the bottom two entries sitting on only 100 views. The post is still there and still exists and has apparently had 112 views, so why isn't it appearing in the list? How many other older posts are no longer showing in this list? This is supposed to be the all time list but does it only select from a certain period, the last year or so? or is there just a glitch in the system that discounts older posts?

Its also good to see that a number of the pages are getting visits, including the tactics page, which, while not actually holding any tactical information, does direct people to other sites which I feel do hold lots of valuable information. If you haven't visited it, go and have a look, hopefully you might find some of the other sites interesting.

I still struggle with this page, I do get what it means but I couldn't explain any of it to anyone with any confidence. What I can say is that it proves why being on the Natfka blog exchange is such a good idea, as you can see, pretty much all my referrals come from either Google or Natfka, through there various sites. The only other site listed on there is the 40k Addict site.

The search keywords are not surprising, with 8th topping out the list and forming most of the rest of it as well. This time round there are no random search's to explain, which was always fun.

As always, this is the page that I like looking at, not just over the whole history of the blog but also in a weekly and monthly basic, as it shows where people are in the world. It always fascinates me, seeing that there are people on the other side of the world reading my blog and maybe commenting on it, proving that this is a truly global hobby. I always like to look at the numbers of where people are in the world, however, I don't think that the list of top 10 countries will change much these days, especially not the top 5 or so, but for the sake of it lets have a quick look;

USA - 5478 - (2862) (742)

UK - 3220 - (1585) (194)

Russia - 2903 - (1151) (185)

France - 1169 - (786) (89)

Germany - 1041 - (438) (71)

Canada - 687 - (182) (-)

Australia - 540 - (232) (-)

Ireland - 483 - (440) (190)

China - 387 - (343) (114)

Ukraine - 346 - (306) (121)

Previous number in brackets (10000 and 2500)

So that's the numbers and there is both a surprise and no surprises at the same time, which is not what I was expecting. The top 10 are still the top 10, with no new countries in there. However, the order has changed quite a bit and some countries have not been visiting very often in the last few months. Ukraine has had only 40 visits and China has had only 44, with Ireland having 43 but both Canada and Australia seem to be enjoying the blog with 505 and 308 views respectively, when previously they weren't even listed. The top 5 counties have be present on the list for quite a while and i can't see them going anywhere. The US still forms one 25% of my views on its own, with the UK and Russia forming another 25%.

All in all, in really happy with how the blog has been going and I'm looking forward to the future and I have lots of ideas and posts in the pipeline to keep things going.