State of the Blog (post #201)

tl:dr - doubled monthly blog views, got two 'catch fire' posts out, see ~1/3 of the views here come with signal-boosting in various places.

Strictly I was planning to do this for the #200 post but I was in hospital for the birth of my daughter, I hope you can understand the prioritisation call I made. I wanted to mark 200 posts with a stock-take of the blog. Last time I did this was Jan-2020 so we have 10 months of blogging behind us for this.

First, most obviously - we have our long baseline of pre-Oct 2020 that says a web-crawler a day will stumble in here. More than that is probably people. Second, there was some bizarre phenomenon over July-August where 100s of views a day were coming from Sweden, some sort of bot I believe. So I scrubbed those months by clipping any daily views over the long run average. Overall we see that a regular post schedule helped an initial hump up to ~1500 views a month but then more than that needs signal-boosting. I have no idea what happened to trigger the March ramp-up - maybe the flywheel of accruing twitter followers, posting to the r/OSR blogroll and so on just hit a threshold?

I was offline this past week and it provided a neat experiment in what is organic vs. signal-boosted page views. I had a stock of written articles I pushed on schedule - with a apology placeholder for my usual weekly links - but I did none of the usual flagging on discord, twitter or reddit. Apparently this signal boosting is worth about ~1/3 of the views that come in here.

So what do people come here to see anyway? Looks like DM toolkit stuff is the most popular.

Place	Top Posts	Views
1	Hidden Depths tables	396
2	Festivities as Social Depth Crawl	369
3	Lizardfolk Culture Post	264
4	Campaign Spin Up: Applying OSR	262
5	How Many? Describing Probabilities	232
6	Retrospective on campaigns run	211
7	Actual Test: MtG Location Generator	210
8	High Speed Hex-crawling	206
9	Actual Test: Making Cities w/ Voronoi-tesselations	204
10	Review: DCC Lankmar	199

I am pretty happy that the Hidden Depths Tables has jumped to the top, I do feel there is something cool and useful in there - and beyond being good content (imho) - it has now gotten more views than the Festivities as Social Depth Crawl that got flagged in the Glatisant (!). I hope people can get some use out of these at their tables, same as I have been inspired by things I have read elsewhere. Some of my most fun sessions have been built off the spark from someone elses post.

I remain puzzled how to characterise this blog - I would call it OSR adjacent because I am here for the DIY gaming and all the 'lets give it a shot and see' ideas that come out of that side of things. I know there is a home for the inspirations, actual tests and lessons-learned posts - I am still not sure if anyone else is getting much from the data and survey crunching posts but I find them fun.

I think my favourite posts, outside of the list above were:
The other culture posts (kobolds and bird-folk)
Figuring out that average age of new joiner is going up no matter what survey we look at (new joiner is not a teen anymore, its a 20-something)
The flying-ship combat tests: the 3e adaptation Shadow of the Spider Moon and the 5e Aces High aerial combat rules from Arcadia #3 published by MCDM as well as the original AD&D Spelljammer and the one that kicked it all off - Calidar skyship combat rules.
Crunching out favoured alignments from surveys to spot the CG players vs LE foes line up.
The complete Kobolds Art Exhibition series - from initial review to final farewell many sessions and months later. A great zine, much fun had with it.

So that is more or less where this place is at. So far, so good. This mix of reviews, ideas, lessons learned and actual tests seems to work. Thanks to all of you who turn up, I hope some of the things you read here are useful, certainly you are not hear for the graphic design. I am happy to take requests here or on any other channel you find me. In particular, if you have any surveys or the like that you want a comparison for, then I am happy to take a dig through the big excel to see what I have.

Finally, a question: if you have a suggestion for how to categorise all the posts in a way that works better for you, I am open to input. I think possible extra categories to help organise things could be 'culture posts' 'DM toolkits' - but I am happy to hear other ideas too.