Monthly Report, December 2005

Time for another monthly report, my way of letting you know how the site is going!

We’re up on visits since last month, with around 1700 visitors a day or so. There were 12000 unique visitors, same as last month. A lot more visits, perhaps reflecting the increase in comment activity. Up by over 25%. The biggest day was actually December 1st, so maybe the blog is getting more boring?

Only 97 people listened to the mp3s I put up. *sigh*

There are now 83 people who have put their names and locations on the blog readers map. Considering that there are apparently 1617 more of you out there, that’s a pathetic percentage. I check this obsessively. You’re damaging my mental health by failing to participate in this useless Internet meme. How will we ever get to the point of having local reader luncheons at this rate? Except for the folks in Australia, who are really kinda spread out. 😛

Most popular pages on the site:

1. The Online World Timeline
2. The Laws of Online World Design
3. Online World Design Patterns
4. Small Worlds
5. The Destiny of Online Worlds, which seems to have fallen off of the Presentations page somehow. Oops. [Fixed now, btw]
6. About Raph (which boy, really needs updated)
7. How to Manage a Large-Scale Online Gaming Community
8. Declaring the Rights of Players
9. Running Massively Multiplayer Games
10. Content creation

Most popular posts can now be seen over to the left. Just to immortalize it for all time, though:

1. Do levels suck? (2718 reads)
2. Do levels suck? Part II (1542)
3. Forcing interaction (1098)
4. Where does popularity come from, or the Wisdom of Crowds revisited (848)
5. The future of content (784)
6. From instancing to worldy games (763)
7. Appealing to women (752)
8. The evil we pretend to do (579) — rising fast considering it’s pretty recent as I write this!
9. Some games worth playing (570)
10. The end of the world (538)

The posts that occasioned the most discussion in December, however, are somewhat different:

1. Do levels suck? Part II
2. Forcing interaction
3. Do levels suck?
4. Appealing to women
5. Where does popularity come from, or the Wisdom of Crowds revisited
6. The future of content
7. Feelin’ groovy (a rant)
8. Player-centered design
9. Last month’s Monthly report
10. The Pixar lesson

From this, I conclude that I need to rant more, or (conceivably) include more graphs in my posts.

Last month, Firefox accounted for 51% of you. This month, Internet Explorer is at 47% and Firefox at 39%. And last month, 13% of you were on Macs, and this month it’s only 6%. Only 2.3% of people find their way here from a search engine query — most everyone gets here via direct link or bookmark.

But 10% of you followed a link here from somewhere else. Where? Most likely, it was

• The Fires of Heaven forums
• Scott Jennings’ “Broken Toys” blog
• The Silky Venom forums
• The Star Wars Galaxies forums
• The f13.net forums
• Xenophase — “British Columbia’s premier online gaming community!”
• The SOA Web Services Journal — because Don Hinchcliffe, in an otherwise unrelated post about the best 2.0 software of the year, linked to the Wisdom of Crowds post. This was also the most reposted link, because this list appeared everywhere.
• GamerGod
• Terra Nova
• Amit’s Game Programming Page, which I think I first appeared on at least five years ago.

Most frequently searched for on the site’s search engine: comments on SWG and the NGE, A Story About a Tree, Blue World, and Roger Caillois.

My favorite search phrases from the Intarweb this month:

• satan’s website — really, I’m flattered, but I don’t even make a convincing minor demon.
• online killing games — sort of ironic, given this post
• clouds poem — not one, but four people. A classroom assignment?
• oubliette emulator — I do believe they mean the game Oubliette from PLATO. But it’s still fun to think about how you emulate a dark pit with no exit.
• grandmother poem — also four people. I suggest you simply teach a class on my poetry.
• oh good — yep.
• swallowed lizard — nope.
• animated antartican dogs — that presumably swallow lizards.
• tinysex logs and normal male fantasies and possibly give her Skittles — I suggest you read this log.
• partial capo — see, some people come here for the guitar stuff!
• shiny moles presumably in antarctica hiding from those voracious dogs.
• names of military killed in action world war II — a tad off-topic.
• websites for penguin mousepads — yes, I have a few available here. Buy one, buy many, give them to your friends. And as for you people trying to hear raph songs online free, why not buy the CD? 🙂
• raph koster moron and you scum meaning and raph smells — yeah, whatever.
• skittles – killer — OK, clearly I had the wrong impression about the Skittles.
• paint a sidekick blue — or not.
• is it normal for my wifes to fantasize about rape — depends. With or without Skittles?
• wife forced into swing club with boss — presumably not the same wife.
• the accountant green skin go to hell — I too prefer human accountants.
• the best website to tell me what is the definition of the colors on germany s flag? — isn’t this one.
• many people looking for an free online game where you go around a maze having sex with people and you can talk to them and variants thereof. Hmm.

Common people mentioned in search engine searches include Chris Whitley (a lot of folks came here looking for the lyrics to “Dirt Floor”), Scott Westerfeld, Sharon Shinn, Alan Moore, Sean Patrick Gallaty, Chuck Bueche, Richard Bartle, Johnnie Walker (er, yeah), Sachant, Maryann Koster (no relation), Chuck Brodsky (folks looking for the chords to “Blow ‘Em Away”), Andrew Greeley, Psychochild, Brian Urbanek, Will Wright, Dr. Cat, Dave Kennerly, Darrin Hyrup, and “furry female avatars.”

Indeed, when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into us.

Happy New Year, everyone! Consider this an open thread. Given that Open Threads are easily the least popular category on the site, we gotta pump up their reads and comments quotients! 🙂