On Wednesday, January 5th, I posted my first post of this blog which more or less presented the mission statement to any who decided to read this as well as to myself to have something that I really wanted to accomplish. I also sort of have one on the sidebar to the right, but the first post basically says "I want to write, and I want to write consistently, so I'm going to make it a 'thing'" and I would say that Kupowered is officially 'a thing'. Though not without its hiccups in activity thanks to poor weather and computer issues, I have pretty much stuck to that goal of consistency to the best of my ability and for that I'm pretty proud of myself. I really wrestled with whether or not I'd be able to do it, more because I worried it would become a 'chore' over time, but (mostly to my surprise) every day has been as exciting as the last, if not more, when I sit down here and actually really get into hammering out one of these posts.
I love doing this blog, doing this writing, and that's why it's going to be so easy to continue doing it into the new year. While I don't always know what I'm going to write about until I actually start doing it (sometimes halfway through a post, I'll notice it's dramatically shifted gears and make a few changes to the title or the earlier body of it to reflect that) I always -want- to write which is likely the most important point. That want, the desire, is more or less why this has kept going and why it's improved over time (at least, I like to think it has) as I've more or less fallen into a way about things or a style even. With any luck, my ability will eventually match my ambition for it and I'll be able to make this a lot better than it is currently; if just by delivering on few promises I've made throughout the year. (Like actually explaining the Romance of the Three Kingdoms period in my own way and getting an actual logo going.) But even if I don't, I bet if I keep at what I've been doing, it'll work out all the same.
Since this is a year in review and I really like statistics, let's have a go at the blog by the numbers. Not including this post, I made 348 posts this year - 17 posts fewer than a full year's worth (365). Since the stated goal was 'every other day', which would have been 183 posts (rounded up), I beat my goal by 165 posts which is quite a wide margin. My most viewed post (according to my stats page) was my "Really Tired" post in which I was silly and decided to talk about Dragons in a fairly casual way (even by my standards) as an attempt to make myself (and hopefully others) laugh with the way it went. At 4,069 pageviews, I'd almost wager it did....if I weren't convinced that 89% or so of those pageviews are actually links to one of the dragon pictures used in the post. My search keyword section constantly has about four or five different entries for 'dragons' or 'cool black dragons' which more or less leads me to believe this which is a little disappointing, but hey, views are views. This is all reinforced by the second most viewed post, "Guilty Pleasures - Yakuza 4's Hostess Maker", which came in at only 290 views All Time.
I'm almost loathe to actually use Blogger's All Time graph for pageviews per month since it's not actually by month (seems to skip every other month and some months have two entires when hovered over), but it's kind of all I can think of to use right now. January 2011 is listed as 538 pageviews between that point (wherever it was in January, perhaps at the end?) and December of 2009 (which, of course, the blog did not exist then). After a little dip in March('s second entry) of 338 pageviews, there was steady growth from that point on to December('s first entry) of 2,297 pageviews which is my all-time high. The second entry for December, which I imagine isn't the solid end-point of it, is currently at 2,217. I honestly don't know how I'm getting all these pageviews, but hell, I'll take 'em. As long as people are reading it's all good, I guess. The part next to the graph that says "Pageviews all time history" has a total of 16,829 currently, which is a number that I can't even figure on. (This is all with the 'Don't track own pageviews' unticked, however I doubt my own views are skewing things that dramatically and considering I've typed all this up, I'm not going to chance turning it off and making myself look silly.)
Moving on to the Audience tab, my top-most country of viewership is, possibly unsurprisingly, the United States with 7,987 pageviews. I don't really link-whore my blog around (which, honestly, I probably should?), but if I do, the majority of the people I link to are in the US. Up next is Canada (thank you Chance!) with 1,123 posts. Australia brings up fourth with 881 views (that are likely not all made by Haplo, but I'm just guessing) and the country with the least pageviews is Denmark with 113. Beats me how Denmark is even on the list, but hey whatevs. (For those interested, the full list is such (Country - Pageviews): United States - 7,987, Canada - 1,123, United Kingdom - 892, Australia - 881, Russia - 485, Germany - 464, Indonesia - 139, Brazil - 136, Ukraine - 134, and Denmark - 113. Which only adds up to 12,354 so I guess the other views are a mish-mash of a smattering of views here and there.) The bulk of these viewings was on Firefox apparently, as it accounts for 7,461 (or 45%) of my views. Next is Internet Explorer with 4,081 (or 24%) and coming in third is Chrome with 3,461 (or 21%). And of those total views, 84% (14,071 views) were done on computers running Windows OS, with the remaining 16% comprising of a mishmash of different OS's. Linux and Mac get 5 and 4 percent respectively (901 and 826, again respectively) and Playstation 3 and PSP are both in the <1% category with 165 and 123 respectively. Something completely surprising to me was that my site was apparently viewed on iPads 124 times, iPhones 111 times and iPods 61 times.
That all might not be interesting to you and I apologize if it's not, but it's absolutely fascinating to me even though with most cases it's just "Hey, these are big numbers that involve your blog". I just think it's a neat little look into the back-end of things, into the mechanics of it rather, and that there might be a few people out there as interested in it as I am. And what better time to cement these numbers than tonight, the end of the year? Though I have to admit those are probably a little dry, so I do have a few more fun numbers to go over.
Since starting this blog, I've made about 26 different 'types' of posts, including "A Look Back", "Giant Robot On", "Weekly Wrap-up in Gaming", "Why Won't They Make These", "LittleBigThings", and "Misadventures in Bargain-Shopping". I quantify these as 'types' in that they're...well, titles for very specialized types of posts. While most of the time my posts have been bringing up something news-worthy and offering my opinion and thoughts on it, these posts are more or less based on my personal experiences and opinions on things, like presenting a specific game or type of game, describing it, and wondering aloud about how difficult it would be to make more of them, wherein the answer is usually 'Not very, but it won't sell well either'. (Why Won't They Make These) Or like talking about anything and everything involving LittleBigPlanet regarding news, my own personal excitement, or my adventures in the wonderful world of LittleBigPlanet. (LittleBigThings) There might be a few others I could include and likewise a few included that might not need to be in there, which is why I said 'about', since it's just a rough gauging.
One of those types of posts was the 'Review', which my first one was made on Monday, July 25th for Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. The game was so galvanizing that I couldn't help but be inspired to do with it what I hadn't done before and what I indeed told myself I wouldn't do in actually presenting something that was not just my opinions, but my overall judgment of the game (which are two very slightly different things). Since then, I've only reviewed two other games (Yakuza 4 and Star Ocean: First Departure) because they've both struck similar chords as Ghost Trick, albeit in widely different ways. It's probably a safe bet to make that I'll review more games in 2012, but that my focus will remain on relating my opinions on the games I play rather than rendering my judgments. Again, they are different things, albeit barely, and I think they're both important enough to have a place here.
While I don't think I could ever pick 'favorite' posts of the year, I will point out a couple of my more memorable ones. In recent memory, my series of two (spoiler warning!) Character Spotlight posts about Caim from the Drakengard series (again, spoilers up ins them) were probably a couple of the posts that I've got most excited about doing. I've said it many times before, but Drakengard is a series close to my heart and Caim and his presentation are a couple of the bigger reasons as to why that is. So getting to really elaborate on that is something that I really wanted to do and that I'm glad I got to do it. Also memorable was (again, spoiler warning!) my two-part What Went Wrong - Chrono Trigger DS series in which I got to elaborate on how bothered I was that Squeenix took one of my favorite games (if not my absolute favorite) from my childhood and, well, really did all they could to try and screw it up. Because they honestly did and thank god there likely won't be a third Chrono game (well, fourth) since all attempts aside from the first have been pretty abysmal.
That's about it, really. It's been a great year and I wanted to be able to really express my achievements with this blog in both personal reasonings and raw numbers and I believe I've adequately done that. I'm sure there's quite a few other things I could've elaborated on and pointed out here, but I covered the major points, I think. I hope everyone who's read this far has enjoyed it and will continue to do so well into the new year while this just grows and grows. Here's hoping for great things in 2012!
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