It’s been 10 years since I relaunched this website. On the one hand, I find it hard to believe. Perhaps not as hard as some of you find it hard to believe. Or perhaps you’re stuck on the fact that I use the term “blogiversary,” but if you’re one of my seven or nine usual readers, you’ve come to expect that kind of thing.
Anyway, the 10th anniversary is traditionally the “Tin” anniversary, which really feels like a ploy by the canned goods industry… of possibly lobbyists from Oz.
So now for the usual look at what are last year’s most visited posts (in what will quickly be recognized as the two main categories) as well as some other reflections.
Star Trek
Honestly, I wasn’t looking for much traffic to the site when I started it 10 years ago, and the algorithms obliged until 2020, when one of my pandemic coping mechanisms was to rank every episode of every Star Trek series and share my musings with the world. This has led to the vast majority of my site traffic being the various Star Trek rankings and, now, viewing guides. There’s one exception to this Trek dominion which I’ll get to later, but Trek traffic will evidently live long and prosper. Well, prosper in terms of Federation’s cashless society, anyway.
This year’s rankings are:
- A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: Voyager (new)
- Every Episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ranked (1)
- Every Episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Ranked (3)
- Every Episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Ranked (4)
- A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: The Next Generation (8)
- A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: Enterprise (6)
- Every Episode of Star Trek, the original series, Ranked (4)
- Every Episode of Every Star Trek Series, Ranked (new)
- Every Episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, Ranked (7)
- Every Episode of Every Star Trek Series, Ranked: The Whole Enchilada (5)
Last year’s rankings are in parenthesis, so you can see, for example, that last March, the viewing guide for Voyager wasn’t in the top nine even though it had debuted a couple months prior, but now it’s the most visited post of the past year except for one.
Most Visited Posts (apart from Trek)
Believe it or not, there are posts I do other than Star Trek, and the 10 most visited posts in the past year (whether they were from 2024 or no) were:
- A Viewing Guide for Babylon 5 (2023) – 1
- TCM Remembers 2024 (2024) – New
- Kurt Vonnegut: “I am very real” (2024) – New
- Film Genre Popularity Over the Decades (2022) – 2
- How I Sort My Favorite Films (2016) – 6
- The 11 Laws of Showrunning by Javier Grillo-Marxuach (2024) – New
- Review: Ben Hur, 2010 version (2023) – New
- Big Bird Bows Out (2018) – New
- Schedule Management: The 0-50-100 Method for Tasks (2016) – 9
- Review: Catch-22, 1970 version (2023) – New
The Babylon 5 viewing guide which just edged out the Star Trek posts a bit last March now leads them by a comfortable margin, which pleases me greatly: hopefully many people are discovering this landmark series. (Unfortunately, it’s probably because of the times we live in relate to the plot a little too close).
There’s a lot of new posts that somehow pleased the algorithm which is nice even if their algorithmic popularity are odd. I can only imagine how many people post the annual “TCM Remembers” video and yet my posting started getting tremendous traffic before I added the annotated list after I first shared it.
Meanwhile, the schedule management one seems to be an evergreen post. It’s been one of the most visited since I posted it. Hey, if it helps folks bring order to project chaos, that’s good. The same goes to the “11 Laws of Showrunning” — and more people should learn about Kurt Vonngegut’s epic letter standing up to censorship.
So overall, I’m pleased all of these posts are getting traffic.
Posts I’d Like to Get More Views
I’ll see brief spikes for this post or that throughout the year as I check the traffic stats, and I get reminded of, a revisit a bunch of posts over the year, which leads me to slowly add them to this list. Some are just because the topic is interesting, some are because the article or video spoke to me again, and well, I want to promote it further. Here are 10 posts in no particular order but for when I noted them in the run-up to this blogiversary post:
- Originality is Overrated. That’s Okay (2018)
- I enjoyed re-reading this so much, I realized it’s because, if anything, the thought of what’s original and what isn’t has become ever more on my mind since 2018 and I’ve done a bunch of writing (and reading and viewing) since then where a story’s originality, or lack thereof, has come up. So, I do need to write a follow-up post to this, but this one may get you thinking about your take on originality (and if it doesn’t, the Chuck Wendig article I reference should).
- If a Worldview can be Destroyed by a Novel, the Problem is not the Novel (2022)
- Like the Kurt Vonnegut post above, this was done as part of my now regular posts during Banned Books Week. And while I in no way buried the lede, this is three minutes well-spent to get to the conclusion.
- Sometimes, Experts Like the Inaccuracy… (2024)
- Related to the ‘originality’ post above, accuracy is always interesting and when one decides to abandon pure factual accuracy, yet maintain truthfulness in the story is a decision point that will occupy storytellers ’til the end of time.
- “If” by Rudyard Kipling (2020)
- Sometimes you just need a thoughtful poem read by Michael Caine. In 2020, boy howdy I did, but it’s great to hear again now.
- The Court Jester’s Duel with Ravenhurst is great. Get it? (2023)
- The Court Jester is, officially, one of my favorite films (#30), so I hype it whenever i can. So I was delighted when I found this video extolling the virtues of one of the funniest and clever fight scenes around.
- The Music of DOOM! er, the Doomsday Machine (2019)
- I grew up with an eclectic mix of music as did many of my generation, but one constant has been TV and film music and some of the score from the original Star Trek series have the bombast you need to do a flying leg kick. This is about one of the best scores, the singular score for the episode “The Doomsday Machine.”
- The Wild (and possibly Sheb Wooley) Origins of the Wilhelm Scream (2023)
- Speaking of films and TV, we have proudly used the “Wilhelm Scream” in various Jabberwocky Audio Theater productions as its use is just and right, so when we learned who might have produced the scream, we were elated.
- Dulles Airport… in Burke?!? (2024)
- Not far from JAT headquarters in Deepest Springfield is the quiet community of Burke (unlike its animated counterpart, Berk, which is plagued by dragons), so the fact that one of the DC area’s main airports was almost there is interesting local history.
- Heraldry, Design, and Ranking State Flags (2023)
- Speaking of history, CGP Grey’s videos are always entertaining and he does his research and, really, please just enjoy.
- On-Screen Death: Championship Round (2021)
- My question to be an audio fiction Sean Bean continues apace as my ‘on-speaker’ deaths steadily rise, but what about the actual Sean Bean and his ranking when it comes to onscreen demises? You’ll have to check out the video to find out (and trust me, though this is from 2021, their #1 has not been beaten).
So, there it is. I’m sure I’ll have more to report and reflect on a year from now. And who knows what the 20th blogiversary will bring… provided Deepest Springfield doesn’t become San Diego…