10th Anniversary!

Today marks the 10th anniversary of my little painting and hobby blog.  Amazing how time flies!  My first post was 1/3/2007 and if you are interested you take a look at it.  When I started I didn't really have a plan or a goal for the blog other that to document my hobby and share cool stuff with fellow gamers.  That is pretty much what I have done and I guess I will stick with that winning strategy.

According to my stat counter I have had 259,461 visitors and more than 400,000 page views in the last 10 years.  Not too bad for an amateur hobby blog.  Interestingly, Google put my all time page views at 551,184 which is quite a bit different from the Statcounter numbers.  Not sure why.  As for posts this will be the 491st post on the blog.  Had I been paying attention over the last few months I could have made this the 500th post at the same time!  If I plan now maybe I can make the 20th anniversary and the 1000th post line up.  Google says I have 293 followers.  I know at one time this was over 300.  I am not sure this function is very popular with people reading blogs any more.  I know I don't really use it.

Over the years I have had varying levels of feedback and comments from my readers.  Back when my content was mostly Games Workshop related (40K and LOTR) I got several comments on most posts.  Since shifting to mostly historical content a few years back the comments and the traffic have slowed a bit.  It would be easy to say this is due to the relative popularity of the games, and this may he something to do with it, but I think it is mostly the quality of the content.  Back in my 40K days I spent more time documenting not just the end results but also the processes.  Now more of the WIP posts are on Twitter and are seen by far fewer people.  This also helps explain the slow down in posts in general.  I think Twitter is something I need to get away from and I need to get back to doing more value oriented content her on the blog.

Anyway, I just wanted to mark this milestone and to thank all the visitors and readers who have stopped by over the years.  Time to get to work on the next 10 years!