It’s a Blogiversary with Fine Pottery Among the Willows… or Something

Nine years ago today, I relaunched a personal website, something Internet denizens hadn’t seen since the days of Netscape Navigator.

Depending on how you mark anniversaries, this will be the pottery or willow anniversary. Not as exciting as the Bronze Anniversary last year, but I guess folks decided that metals could use a break.

As with previous versions of this blogiversary post, I’ll be looking at the posts that were popular over the past year and other stats worthy of inscribing on a ceremonial pot (possibly underneath a willow tree).

Star Trek

Once again, the total traffic to my site goes to posts related to my ranking every episode of every Star Trek series. I have pleased the algorithm gods so much that searching for my name gets some of these results, which is insane, but is it Garth of Izar insane? In any case, this year’s rankings are:

1. Every Episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ranked (2)
2. Every Episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Ranked (3)
3. Every Episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Ranked (4)
4. Every Episode of Star Trek, the original series, Ranked (1)
5. Every Episode of Every Star Trek Series, Ranked: The Whole Enchilada (5)
6. A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: Enterprise (new)
7. Every Episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, Ranked (6)
8. A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: The Next Generation (new)
9. Every Episode of Star Trek, the animated series, Ranked (7)

The pattern I saw last March continued for the rest of the year: with the final season of Picard, more people started googling Next Generation rankings. Intent on saving fans from hours of early TNG tedium, I created a viewing guide for it just a little under a year ago and, in overall views, it’s racing to pass the much older Enterprise viewing guide.

Last year’s rankings are in parenthesis and you see a general shift from the original Trek to the 90s series. I won’t be surprised if Voyager goes up in the ranks again once the documentary comes out. And the viewing guide for Voyager, which I put out in January, is in breathing distance of the TAS ranking at #9.

I’m also guessing the newer Trek series will inch up as I actually catch up in ranking the newer seasons (and whole new series!). A lot has debuted since I created these lists in 2020.

Most Visited Posts (apart from Trek)

Believe it or not, there are posts I do other than Star Trek, and the nine most visited posts in the past year (whether they were from the past year or no) were:

1. A Viewing Guide for Babylon 5 (2023) – New
2. Film Genre Popularity Over the Decades (2022) – 1
3. Public Domain Day, 2024 (2024) – New
4. Schedule Management: The 0-50-100 Method for Tasks (2016) – 3
5. R.I.P. Angela Lansbury: A Grand Dame for the Ages (2022) – New
6. How I Sort My Favorite Films (2016) – New
7. TCM Remembers, 2023 (2024) – New
8. Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick Two. (2022) – 5
9. Schedule Management: Exceptions to the 0-50-100 Method (2016) – 4

Traffic to the Babylon 5 viewing guide started slowly last year, but picked up steadily so that it now edges out the viewing guide for Star Trek: The Next Generation (see above) ever so slightly. In fact, all the viewing guides have taken off last year as you may have guessed from the Trek list above. Not only that, some readers have asked me to do more viewing guides for other shows like Stargate, Farscape, and Doctor Who. I’m not sure when I will get to any of those, but I’m also saying we don’t need another pandemic. Please.

In the meantime, I’m happy to see several posts that aren’t viewing guides nor Star Trek get some hits, especially the relatively new public domain one, as that’s a topic I’m very interested in. It’s also fun to see posts I made about schedule management eight years ago still get noticeable traffic. Finally, for the life of me, I don’t know how the Angela Lansbury post got so much traffic, but if that causes more people to check out her work in The Court Jester, then I have done a good deed.

Posts I’d Like to Get More Views

In checking the posts for the past year, I always see some surprising ones that have spikes of popularity, but are reminded of some that would be great to get more views, often nothing to do with my writing, but because it links to an illuminating article or video (the first one in the list would be an exemplar of that). Here are nine posts, more or less in order:

• The Surprising Profit Center for Airlines (2022)
• Ending the Story in Flight (2021)
• Let’s Go Over the Bonus Situation: Remembering Yaphet Kotto (2021)
• Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick Two. (2022)
• The Wild (and possibly Sheb Wooley) Origins of the Wilhelm Scream (2023)
• The Root of Many a Conspiracy Theory via Ramsey Theory (2021)
• My Favorite ‘Scape (2018)
• Farscape and Mental Health (2021)
• Ted Lasso and the Turn, Turn, Turns of TV Seasons (2022)

And now we’ll see what happens between now and the 10-year mark!