State of the Blog (post #800)

Was a bit of a grind these last dozen or so posts getting a bunch pre-written so I could travel but as we hit this milestone number I am somewhat happier to continue blogging and am a touch more optimistic about the general health of the blog-o-sphere at the moment. Long may it last.

On Traffic

It remains hard to tell is the trend in traffic growth across this place real people or bots. Even accepting that a large fraction (~50%) of internet traffic is bots, that fraction has been stable over the past could of years so the slow up-ward trend in visitors might be real folk. Comments suggest people real people do turn up here (welcome!) and mention made elsewhere of the shiny weekly links posts - and some very welcome direct email appreciation - suggests people find those useful.

So all in all - probably more of you stopping by than before but very, very hard to say anything more definite than that.

The restart of the r/OSR blogroll is having a small impact. Although it has come back as a shadow of its former self - roughly half the participants despite the same amount of upvotes as the latter days - there are flickering signs of growth as the weeks progress. Dare I say another subtle sign of blog-o-sphere health?

Gratitude must also be expressed at this point to u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble for generously taking over blogroll duties these past four weeks while I was travelling - it is not important who posts it, just that it gets posted regularly!

On Comrades

All the above makes me ever more grateful for the concrete evidence of folk who read this and decide it is worth their time by putting it on their own blogroll, my most sincere gratitude for that vote of confidence. Once more I must thank the following comrade-bloggers from whose sidebar blog-rolls readers find their way here. Many have appeared before:
DIY & Dragons,
Nothics Eye,
Retired Adventurer,
Archons March On,
Shuttered Room,
Bruce Heard,
Lizardman Diaries,
Weaver.skepti.ch,
Chaudron Chromatique,
Ynas Midgard,
Uncaring Cosmos,
Kelvin Green,
Awesome Lies,
Spot Hidden,
Wierd Wonderful Worlds,
A Continent of Banalities,
All Wizards Are Bastards,
Advanced Mystery and Manners,
Prismatic Wasteland,
Beneath Foreign Planets,
Taskerland,
Tim S Brannan,
Spriggans Den and Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings
plus new appearers
Sable Mage,
Forrest for the Trees,
Bjork's blog,
Drama Dice,
Glass Candles,
Xenograg,
Archbrick and
Eldritch Fields
and the folks at Gaming Tavern.

On Writing

The past 50 post have seen continued participation in the RPG Blog Carnival plus a couple of good bandwagons - GLÅUGUST 2025, the Beholder bandwagon, Conclave bandwagon, How I Prep bandwagons and Holes bandwagon being the big ones followed by Summer Lego Jam #2 and with Hexcrawl25 as the other big drivers for blogposts.

The RPG Blog Carnival is going strong, I have been made Carnival Captain of that channel in the purple OSR discord to try and gently encourage it along there too.

Hexcrawl25 has been living up to its purpose - I have been running a campaign in it which has kept both driven the hex-map creation as the players wandered about and kept it interesting as I got to try out different methods and blog about them.

On Goals

Judging by what gets mentioned elsewhere, people appreciate the shiny weekly links and when I participate in other folks jams and challenges so I will continue to do those.

The backlog of half-done posts is pretty substantial, I have a months worth of posts in fully baking and publishing things lying around, even before I get into slush-pile posts.

I find thinking time is getting scarcer, addressing a blank file tougher to do from a standing start - which is why I greatly appreciate the jams and challenges for that jump-start.

Carving out time to do reviews has become much harder - in particular the application of brain to turn it from a mechanical listing of the parts of a book to the application of brain to synthesise that into some meaningful opinion.

I wrote this coming off the back of a month-long slog to build a backlog of posts (which you have just been through late July/early August reading) while I was travelling - now that I am back at base I have drafts for more GLÅUGUST 2025 posts, an RPG Blog Carnival draft and thoughts on Appendicitis N - never mind the blog challenges I have let pass me by - RPG-a-day, Mythic Bastionland Jam and the Icon0clasm Ball. I think it a good thing that there is a ferment of activity out there and this summer seems to have been marked by a couple of pulses of band-wagoning which is great.

My schedule is full through to the start of September, I have drafts to fill most of that month then we roll into the yet-to-be-revealed GLoGtober '25, throw in some RPG Carnivals and suddenly we are staring down the end of the year. Ample blog-prompts to goad one to activity and it feels a touch more active now than 800 posts ago pre-pandemic. Long may it continue.