Observations of the Fox

    After a decade or so where my top 10 posts have all been mapping tutorials, a recent upswing in views has seen my introductory Mage: the Ascension post crack the list. Now I'm going to have to check if a new edition of the game has been released (or is about to be)... 

I knew it was coming soon, and it's like that thing where you watch the odometer of the car ticking over.. ...then...    ...I missed the moment.  There's actually been a higher number of views in recent months than there has been in the 16 years that I've been writing this thing.    I think the last milestone of 1.5 million happened some time last year, after a period when I though the views were subsiding and I was just going to give up on the whole thing. But all in all, it's just a number. I'll keep doing what I do, and if folks are interested they'll come to have a look.   

 I've been looking at some of the posts that have done well recently... Like this post from the beginning of 2024, which gave an overview of life since the blog had started and alluded to some ideas that had been intended at the time.   Or, curiously,  this old post from 2012 about LARP, which basically predates my involvement in a few LARP groups, that I helped to run and then started to run on my own.  Or the evergreens like this post about my favourite game Mage the Ascension, or this post which started off the map drawing tutorials that I ran through almost a decade ago. Another surprising one that's seen a bit of traction lately is this one which describes some of my earlier thoughts about making a more modern and story driven game based on Mage: the Ascension. It's kind of weird that the post from the series that's getting the views is halfway through the sequence... however, it is one of the early stages of thought that has led to the SNAFU system th...

The last time I mentioned the traffic here at the blog was in early September , and I was getting a bit more traffic than expected. However, at the end of September the spike in traffic just kept going up.     It has basically skewed the entire data for the history of the blog. In early years, I'd had a few months peaking above 20k, in the last 2 years a couple of months even peaked above 30k, but last month managed to beat 180k.  Today, as of 6am Australian Eastern Standard Time....it looks like everything has gone back to it's previous rate of traffic. Instead of hundreds of views every hour, we're back to a dozen or so. I've had previous anomalies where a one-off hour might have had a few hundred a few hundred views, but getting that level of traffic for over a month was just weird. Anyway...seems to be over now.

I knew it was coming soon, if there had been a few more of those weird anomalies where the blog gets thousands of views each day for a week or so, it would have happened last month...if there had been a lull in viewership if probably would have happened next month. But with consistency, it happened today. We reached 1.5 million views, not long before writing my 2500th post (which is still a couple of posts away). That means on average, we're looking at about 600 views per post.  The top viewed few posts actually vary a bit from that.  Map Drawing Tutorial 1 (22.6k views) Map Drawing Tutorial 4 (13.4k views) Map Drawing Tutorial 2 (13k views) Map Drawing Tutorial 3 (12k views) A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 7) (7.3k views)  This is hardly surprising since I saw a bunch of my map tutorials circulating on Pinterest while I was using it.  There are 38.5k views of my Map Tutorials page, so I guess people have found that, and have linked across to other pages on the blog...