My One Year Anniversary

I am celebrating my first anniversary – my blogging one, that is.  I have now been at this whole “blogging thing” for a year now.  It does seem a little wrong to be celebrating the “paper anniversary” for an endeavor that is completely paperless, but I didn’t make up the tradition.

It’s been quite an interesting experience.  There have been lows (writing what you feel is a great post and getting zero comments) and there have been highs (someone letting you know they loved a movie they watched because of your recommendation.)

Some of you may be saying, “Hold on there, Chip.  What do you mean your first anniversary?  Didn’t that happen, like, two or three weeks ago?  I think your calendar is a little slow.”

Yes, I did my first posts on December 29^th, 2010, but I do not consider that the start of my blogging.  I did the posts as the first step in choosing what designs I wanted for the blog, how I wanted the text to appear, trying inserts of photos, links, etc.  I had to decide on ads or no ads.  I had to figure out how to do the Amazon links.  I had to plan out how I was going to work with the Labels to make it easier for people to find things that interest them.

I finally sent out a link to some friends on January 6^th, 2011 and asked them to take a look and let me know what they thought.  I got almost zero responses, so I took a couple of days to rethink, and then finally started blogging for real with some posts on January 11^th, 2011.  Fast forwarding to now, I wanted to finish up my Harry Potter related posts, so I missed my actual anniversary by two days.  Hey, this way I get the whole weekend to party hard.  Maybe I’ll do something wild and crazy like, I don’t know, watch some movies.

My approach for this blog has changed some.  I originally planned it to be a set of 3-5 reviews of related movies, plus a book review and a hike review, per week.  Even though it already concentrated on movies, I found myself almost exclusively posting on films after joining the Large Association of Movie Blogs (LAMB) last summer.  I have also changed from posting several reviews all in one day, to posting one per day to even things out.  It seems to flow better that way.  (I still plan to write up a bunch of hikes I did last fall in Acadia National Park – probably when we get closer to spring.)

Even though the approach has been modified some, my reason for doing these posts has not.  John Baxter of Knifed in Venice recently left a comment on my In Bruges review that really summed up what I am trying to do.  He wrote, “Love the film, great review.  It’s referrals like this that hopefully turn people towards movies they missed due to their scale on theatrical release.”  I love nothing better than someone finding out about a great movie, book, or hike because of my review.

I’d like to thank everyone who have become Followers and/or who have been reading my posts.  Hopefully you have found them informative and/or entertaining.  If you really like a post, please share it with your friends.  My recent post on the Five Best Non-Traditional Christmas Movies proved to be pretty popular.

Finally, for the stats people (you know who you are), here are some numbers for my first year blogging:

Number of total posts:                      291

Average posts per month in 2011:   23

Number of movie related posts:    200

Number of movie reviews:              164

Number of book reviews:                  30

Number of hike reviews:                   28

Number of humor posts:                   29

Number of TV show reviews:           10

Number of website reviews:               2

Number of golf course reviews:         1

My ten most viewed posts were:

1. Humor - Look-alike Celebrities
2. Humor - World War II Social Networking
3. Movie - Speed (1994)
4. Hike - Mount Battie and Megunticook Mountain
5. Movie - 12 Angry Men (1957)
6. The Five Best Non-Traditional Christmas Movies
7. Movie - The Iron Giant (1999)
8. Movie - Pitch Black (2000)
9. Movie - Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
10. Movie - Kung Fu Panda (2008)

Of the roughly 18,500 views (4,500 just last month), The U.S. is still far and away where the most visitors come from (54.3%), followed by The U.K. (5.4%), Canada (4.5%), Germany (3.7%), and Australia (2%) rounding out the Top 5.  The next five are India, Russia, France, Brazil, and The Netherlands.

Google and Facebook dominate all Top 10 referring sites.  As for searches, people really want to find out the name of the guy that looks like Johnny Depp (Skeet Ulrich), as well as Katy Perry and Zooey Deschanel looking like each other, and Keira Knightley being in Star Wars.  All three of these have led to my Celebrity Look-alikes post having five times as many views as the second most popular post.

The browser most often used is Chrome (28%).  Internet Explorer (27%) and Firefox (26%) follow close behind.  Safari (12%) is a distant fourth.

The operating system most used is Windows (65%).  It is followed by Macintosh (16%) and Linux (9%).  Among mobile devices, the iPhone is most popular, followed by Android, the iPad, and then Blackberry.

I have seen some people use these kinds of posts to list the movies they watched in the last year.  I did not think to track that in 2011.  I might start doing that this year.  I admit that I am kind of curious myself to see what I’ll find at the end of 2012.

Until then, thanks for reading.