Art by M-RS of Incise-Soul.

It is hard to believe that I reached this point in blogging; it seems not so very long ago when I celebrated a year in blogging. Yet here I am, making this post. It has been two years since I started blogging, and I wonder at the same time, just how many blogs have gone two years and beyond. Not very many, I am afraid.

But you are not here to dwell on the inactivities and gradual fading of other blogs. It is truly remarkable that I have reached what might be called a cyber decade in this fast-paced digital world. Unlike previous milestones however, I really have no idea what I should write about this time round. I grow older by the day, and more senile. Lack of brain-churning material and a dissident lifestyle has only led me down the path of depravation, especially mentally.

So I decided to just do a post based on statistics…and of course, some eyecandy. We all know how that draws in the hits crowd.

GoStats, the external tracker I use to track my site statistics, has not been very consistent because I only installed it in May of 2008, and further in September the same year, I screwed up the statistics due to a bug in the site tracking when I moved hosts. So it is difficult to say if the statistics are currently correct, but it is the one I will use throughout the post.
 

No idea who drew her, but this is Shishidou Takane of Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo, the 7th female 2D character to make it into my 2D harem, and the second this year.

Posts

This is the 739th post of the blog, and my 637th post (not including Ruri’s). Compared to the first year’s number of posts, I definitely made fewer posts this year. Not just life, but also ups and downs in the blogging life and other stuff made me post less. It was good in a way – I doubt if people were actually bothering to keep up with daily posts most of the time. My blog’s content is definitely not made for stuff like that. Maybe it once used to be, but now? Nah.

It is still amazing that such a large amount of posts were chalked up, but I would have thought that I would break 750 posts by the turn of the third year. Still, at the rate we are going, it is quite likely that by the end of the third year, this blog would have broken 1000 posts, or be very nearly there.

GoStats started being silly around April and stopped collecting data for no apparent reason on post popularity by month, though if I set it to a custom period within the past two months (the only available time frame) I am shown the correct statistics for that time period. So I am unable to say exactly which post was the most popular this year until after the year has passed. Pity. I am sure some very notable posts would have made it into the top ten posts with most views this year, especially those pertaining to the anime series Bakemonogatari.
 

Once again, the artist is unknown. This is a damn fine piece of art of Megurine Luka, the newest addition to the Vocaloid family who was released earlier this year, and will soon celebrate her birthday in just a little under 2 months’ time.

Authors

I have seen co-authors and guest writers come and go on this blog, but that has never meant that I have not been grateful for their help. Kona, YuKi-To, LittleNeko and Tourak no longer write for me, but they have done so in the past and I thus thank them. My current writers are all busy with life and/or school, and are thus preoccupied. Once again I wish I had a consistent author, but that would be too much to ask for since this blog is not well-known.

I do appreciate the input of the current authors however – Shadro, Shadow, D and Lelouch are the ones who still write for me from time to time when they can. Shadow has exams and school and will be back around December 17th. I am unsure as to the current state of activity for the others. Thanks to all of them for continuing to write for me. shawurai was here for only one post, his self introduction, but I do not blame him as he was never into the passion of blogging. Together, these writers account for 92 posts, with Lelouch leading the pack at 25 posts.
 

A vector image of Charlotte Hazellink, from the anime series Princess Lover!, one of the biggest contenders for this year’s Top Ten Female Characters of the Year in anime.

Comments

Comments are the key to really finding out if your posts are quality, or if people do even read them. I thus thank all the people who have commented on the blog, and continue to encourage people who wish to comment but somehow do not find it appropriate to do so (I wonder why). Then again, I understand that if you have nothing constructive to say, it might not be worth saying anything; it is difficult to put a one-liner if you do not already know the blogger beforehand and can thus joke in the comments for a post.

Here are the top ten commentors according to WP-Stats so far. The statistics do not account for my own comments. As of this post, there are 4,069 comments and 744 of them were my own. The total number does include trackbacks and pingbacks though. The current post-to-comment ratio is very close to 1 : 4.5, and this ratio does not include my own comments.

Lelouch (126)
YuKi-To (108)
Blowfish (107)
k (88)
Chong Mizunaga (80)
andra (67)
Gordon (65)
lovelyduckie (65)
Kona (60)
phossil (56)

Thanks to all these people who return regularly and comment, as well as the myriad of other commentors that are way too many to be mentioned here. You all add to the blogging experience, giving me and my authors constant feedback and interaction.
 

I know what you are thinking – finally an ecchi image! This is a character from Monster Hunter, no idea which, and I also do not know, yet again, the artist who drew this.

Blogosphere

After the early drama of this year, I have largely retreated from the blogosphere, but even before that, I was starting to lose interest in visiting as many new blogs as I once did. Nowadays, I have even removed many blogs from my feedreader, simply because they disinterest me, are no longer updated, or moved away from their original content. I still have many of your blogs on my feedreader of course, but going to a new blog and subscribing to it now takes a lot more effort (to make me do so, that is) than before.

I stopped really going around the blogosphere; I have come to realize that the aniblogosphere is made up of a core group of people, like so many other groups, that is almost impossible to break in or familiarize yourself with. And to that end, there is little point anyway; I do not write as good an editorial as some of them do, I do not know how to really write about an anime series at large, my writing skills are never up to par, and more. Truly, since when could I actually be considered a blog that delved into anime culture until recently? I was more into the otaku culture, which speaks a vast difference. And even now, how many of my posts are actually on anime?
 

I never considered this blog or myself to be part of the blogosphere much – coming along so far into blogging has made me realize to the degree of truth in that particular line of thinking. The number of page views per day for this blog has dwindled constantly; I wonder to myself if people even bother to read here anymore or even check back from time to time. There is always our RSS feed (which you can subscribe to, if you have not done so already, through the link at the top of the sidebars) but I changed it back to show just a summary, as some of my episodics (especially Bakemonogatari’s) can be filled with too many images.

I also managed to get on Twitter, where most of the blogosphere interaction is. But there is only so much you can say there, though it is good for very short exchanges or news snippets and the like to inform others about. It does help in microblogging I suppose, among other things. If you follow me though, I might or might not follow you back; sometimes people just tweet too much at one go and I just stop having the faith to bother following them.
 

Right now, I suppose I ought to be thankful for the readers I still continue to get, but the old bunch who used to read my blog have probably drifted from reading it, or simply skim through it (if even that) from time to time. It is just a matter of interest – my posts no longer were what they once were, the content has changed, etc.

I thank anyone who even follows me on a regular basis though. I certainly do not get many comments per posts, perhaps people feel my posts are tl;dr and stuff, or they just have nothing they want to say. I do hope there will be more comments in the future, even from those who have followed a long time. I would keep in mind that reader-author interaction is still the best way to go for a blog and its content.
 

Art by Kanzeon.

Future

So, what lies in the foreseeable future for the blog? I certainly do not plan on stopping anytime soon – I have a backlog (rather large, at that) of posts I want to do, though some ideas will almost certainly be thrown out of the window on grounds of the sheer amount of effort required to write them. I will continue to look for writers, but I rather not make a post asking people. I doubt I can get any better results that way anymore.

As for my blogroll, I have removed a huge number of blogs that I deem to no longer relate to mine or have been inactive for such a long period of time that they might as well be dead. If you wish to exchange links with me, either leave a comment in this post, or contact me. The only new blog I added was Wolfheinrich’s World, because he specifically asked for a link exchange.

I also updated all pages of the blog, so all the information in those pages above are current and up-to-date. Other than that, the theme changes so far will probably stand for a long time, though minor adaptations may be done here and there in the near future.
 

Finally, as of this post, the blog has racked up 358,905 page views (which is almost entirely accurate ever since I installed the tracker in May 2008). It will be a long time until my next landmark of 500K page views. I doubt I can even reach it within the next year at this rate. But thanks to everyone who continues to visit on a regular basis; in the past 12 months, there were 256,985 page views, way more than the first year managed to get. You guys (and gals) all rock.

And on an almost related note, the amount of spam my plugin has caught since its inception is going to go past 25K comments soon. I sure get a lot of spam.
 

And how can I not have an image of quite possibly the biggest reason for the rise in the blog’s number of page views in summer, Senjougahara Hitagi herself, who may yet oust every other female character this year as the most popular anime female character of the year. I have no idea who drew this nekomimi rendition though.
 

Anyway, here is to another year of blogging. May we all enjoy the content that a blog brings forth, in either posts or discussions, from whomever may post, and whomever that may comment on a post.

Related posts:

1. 10 to The Power of 5
2. 250K Hits – The New Waifu
3. January 2009 Blog Traffic Stats
4. 50K Hits LOLWUT?
5. Random Blog Stats – Tribute to the Blog & Readers