Another year of blogging

Well, a year and a day have passed since I last reviewed all the traffic this blog gets so on my birthday, it seems as good a time as any to take another look and see if anything's different.

Just like last year, I cack-handedly turned off Google Analytics tracking for part of February, which I suppose at least makes year-on-year comparisons a bit fairer. (Statistically speaking, this is like saying "Hey! Don't worry about breaking your ankle - you've broken your wrist too!")

Just like last year, apart from the home page this archive of July 2006 was still the most popular single page, although it only made up 3% of traffic this year, vs almost 10% last year. The next most popular page was my handy automatic advice generator, Get Something Done and then in third place a page that hit the sweet spot of mentioning both a holiday in the US and nudity. It wasn't linkbait, honest.

Of what I've written this year that's had the most people look at it that wasn't an automated comedian or abuse machine, the most significant thing has been Blogalongabond. Of the top 10 pages, only one of them wasn't a Blogalongabond post (and that was the magical nudity entry I mentioned before):

1. St Patrick's Day And Nudity
2. You Only Live Twice
3. Goldfinger
4. Thunderball
5. Dr No
6. From Russia With Love
7. Moonraker
8. Diamonds Are Forever
9. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
10. Live And Let Die

As I said when I started, this was an exercise that might well reveal more about me than it does about James Bond, but it's been very interesting to watch a lot of old films (and discover that there were more Bond films that I'd already watched than I realised). It's been painful for my wife sometimes (particularly as we go through the late 70s nadir of Bond films) but it's been a good experience. I wonder what I'll do to focus my mind after December 2012 of course - is there another series of things that I could look at regularly?

Aside from those, nothing that I've written this year has set the world alight like what I said about Piranha 3D last year - I generated a bit of interest for a quick guide to buying cameras in Hong Kong and some playing around with data, but nothing else that really grabbed people's attention. Still, all that constant writing is making some people read, and even if you chop out all the Blogalongabond traffic, Comments(0) was read 36% more in the last 12 months than in the preceding year.

Bing traffic has grown by 36% on last year, but it was pretty meaningless last year, and still is now; 91% of my visits from search engines comes from Google. As one might expect, given that Google own Blogger and Microsoft, well, don't. "dislocated shoulder" is the second most popular search term that people use to find me (which is why July 2006 turns out to be so popular, apparently) and then I get a lot of people wondering whether Kelly Brook used a body double or not in Piranha 3D. Bless 'em. I was actually exercised enough by this phenomenon to write this in May. Which predictably enough, hardly anyone read (14 page views in about 7 months). "dislocated shoulder" was only the 14th most popular search term in 2009-10, so perhaps I'm becoming more relevant. Or more people are hurting themselves.

This is also the year that I began to be discovered by spam bots. It's still only a trickle rather than the avalanche some people fall prey to, but I've had a few attempts to turn the blog into a shill for Chinese fake handbag retailers, plus somebody who would quite like me to sell beer fridges. In general though everyone takes 'Comments(0)' to be an instruction, rather than an observation, and I keep pumping these words out into the void. (I'd quite like it if somebody did reply to me, but it appears Google's commenting system isn't always that reliable anyway, and eats some people's responses.)