Well, it’s been just over half a year since I started the blog, so I figured I’d post some stats on how thing have been going.

Top 5 posts:

Initially my largest-traffic posts were the “bits,” especially ones that referenced fairly recent games, e.g., Fable 2. I’m rather pleased that the articles discussing game design eventually took over, though. Below is a list of my top 5 posts and the amount of individual hits each one received.

• What made those old, 2D platformers so great? (21, 048)
• A layman’s guide to projection in videogames. (6, 772)
• How I got art for my game, part 1. (6, 294)
• The 1-pixel collision box. (6, 252)
• The magic of secrets. (5, 710)

Top 5 individual referrers:

I get quite a bit of regular traffic from various sites, but these were the top sources for individual posts.

• Slashdot (9, 010)
• Reddit (3, 792)
• Plaza.fi (2, 203)
• Blue’s News (1, 132)
• StumbleUpon (1, 094)

Top 5 search engine terms:

To be completely honest, some variation of GTA takes up all of the top five spots in this category. Every day I get about 25 hits from these searches, but since listing “hot coffee” 5 times wouldn’t be as interesting, I’m including spots 6 through 9 as well.

• hot coffee mod (789)
• blazblue (282)
• escher (245)
• touhou (196)
• ink splatter (169)

Top 5 funniest and oddest search engine terms:

These aren’t nearly as common as the ones above, but they have made me pause and/or snicker every so often.

• real hot sex – Boy, someone must’ve been really disappointed! But aren’t there billions of sites that should show up before mine if you google that?
• cattle prods for sale – Once again, sorry to disappoint.
• hidden stairway next to royal mausoleum – This one’s just very specific, and it made think of someone planning an elaborate heist.
• cars attack video games – Everyone seems to have it out for videogames these days…
• renaissance paupers – Well, I do consider myself an authority on the subject, but this was still a little surprising.

Average daily traffic:

Over the span of 6 months, I’ve averaged 550 hits a day. This number is a bit skewed, though, as the traffic tends to spike up periodically. Basically I get 250-350 visits a day, and when I write a post that gets a lot of attention, I get a couple thousands hits over the span of 1-3 days.

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The experience has been quite good overall. I like jotting down all these miscellaneous thoughts, and the topics I’ve covered have led me to meet some pretty interesting people (and two individual freelance design gigs to boot).

Hopefully the next 6 months will be just as eventful.