← Gone Away
It's my Blogbirthday!
A year ago today, the Gone Away blog was born, kicking and yelling its way into the blogosphere. It was a fairly basic baby, having no comments system, just one chameleon graphic and no RSS feed. The comments, RSS and other improvements were grafted on along the way, a few more graphics added, and it grew fat with subjects beyond the American Journal it started with. And now it survives as a healthy infant, still growing, still requiring constant attention, but beginning to find its feet and get into mischief.
This morning the blog received its first blogbirthday present, from Technorati of all places. For months, Technorati has insisted that the blog has 50 links from 45 sites and is at position 40,418 in its list. But today it appears that the list has been updated at last; Gone Away is now credited with position 19,184 and has 274 links from 81 sites. Thank you, Technorati! And thank you too, all of you who have demonstrated such fine taste and good sense in linking to me.
In celebration of this momentous event, my son, Mad, was going to design a new header. But I have been unable to contact him this morning and so have no idea whether this is being implemented or not. Time will tell, I guess.
In the meantime, I can show off a bit with a few statistics and graphs that show the baby's growth over these last twelve months. I know this is a bit like passing baby pics around but humor me, I'm the proud father. Let's look at hits first; they always give some impressive-sounding numbers. Notice that these are the figures for MadTV - it is very difficult to separate Gone Away's figures from the main site's but, since most of the traffic goes to me, the numbers give us a reasonable idea of how I'm doing.
Apart from a few blips, the general trend is relentlessly upwards and we are now getting in the region of 6,000 hits a day. Not bad for a beginner.
Now for the sessions stats, an indication of how many unique visitors we're getting:
This is a smoother graph than the one for hits although the blips are still evident. Again, the trend is upwards and we are now getting 800 visitors a day. Small beer compared to the top blogs but healthy for a litblog, methinks.
For the entire year, we have had 877,762 hits and 148,091 sessions.
Okay, so those are the statistics but what real achievements do we have to look back on? I thought it might be a good idea to pick out those posts that I think the best in each category. Think of it as similar to the film industry awarding itself accolades every year. These are my picks:
American Journal: Oklahoma Nights. This was a very early post, before the days of comments and, as a result, it has none. I think it deserves better.
Memories of Africa: Chimanimani. A fairly easy choice since the Manis are so spectacular.
Memories of England: A Place Apart. My favorite place in England; this one was always going to win its category.
Computer related posts: The Computer and I. A more difficult choice, particularly as Slay held the comments record for so long, but this one wins because it defines where I'm coming from in respect of computing.
Blogging: Writers' Blogs and the Mighty PR. This one was the beginning and cause of the Writers Blog Alliance and so I think it wins by virtue of being "the post that launched a thousand dreams".
General Thoughts: Art. This, too, was a new beginning; I think the first time I decided to put down my thoughts on a subject entirely unrelated to anything the blog had dealt with before. It seemed quite well-received and encouraged me to do more.
And, finally, the jewel in the crown, since fiction is really my first love -
Fiction: Thermopylae. Thermopylae is my darling and was the whole reason for this awards exercise. It's weird and wonderful, quirky and unashamed, and, even though it's one of those things that I only do when in a crazy mood, I love it because it works! And yes, of course this is a way to get more people to read it...
And so endeth the awards ceremony and my little celebration of a year's blogging. If you only read one of the links up there, make sure it's Thermopylae. For those who don't know, let me just add that Thermopylae was the place where 120 Spartans under Leonidas held back the entire Persian army of thousands that was invading Greece. They were betrayed and overrun in the end but bought enough time for the other Greek city states to organize a defense.
Go read it - you'll love it or hate it!