Ten things I've learned today

I've been busy travelling for and celebrating my dad's 50th birthday all day today and have therefore had pretty much no time to come up with anything really worthwhile to blog about. That said, here's some cop-out bulletpoints about "what I've learned today":

• People who can be bothered to pay for an iPod but can't be bothered to fork out twenty quid more for a decent pair of earphones, instead opting to use the crappy white earbuds that come with their shiny trendy MP3 player, really really irritate me.
• Booking a seat on a train does not necessarily guarantee that seat being reserved for you on said train (especially if the train seats have been "downloaded wrong"...)
• The longer you are away from London is directly proportional to the amount you notice other people not looking where they are going whilst walking quite fast towards you.
• The state of being exactly half the age of one of your parents is kind of odd but also kind of cool.
• Taking a risk on the selection of a birthday present is stomach-churning during the unwrapping, but incredibly rewarding when the present turns out to have been a very good choice.
• It's always great to open your parents' fridge and see lots of food that is generally more expensive than what you buy, not paid for by you and almost certainly entirely available to you.
• Seeing your old room completely "de-you-ed" is always slightly strange (but when your old room is as small as mine is, it's always satisfying to know you now have much more space to call your own).
• Playing with your parents' dog makes you realise how much you want a dog even though there is no practical way that you could possibly own and look after one at this stage in your life.
• Having one of your favourite restaurants close down in one year is like losing an old friend; having two close down is simply devastating, and makes you want to plan trips to those that are still open as soon as possible.
• Feeling like your family and your girfriend really do like each other, rather than just exchanging niceties, is a lovely feeling indeed.

Not a brilliant entry, but there you go. I promise to put in one-and-a-half times my normal effort tomorrow to make up for it.

Bon Anniversaire...

One year ago today, I sat down and wrote the first entry on this blog. There was no stated purpose to it, no niche to fill, no audience to satisfy - it was simply an attempt to develop a sustainable personal model for blogging. The ideal situation a year on (though I didn't specifically mention this in the original post) was that the blog would still exist and still be active. That people would be writing on it and people would be reading it. And in that sense, I am hugely pleased to have got this far.

I've been tracking the site since December on Google Analytics, and so I can give a run down of the trends from this year at least. The full report is a pdf, which you can have a look at here (it's not massive, and it's just the default report, but gives a good overview of the different things Google Analytics can track).

The basic visitor trend looks like this:
The spike near the beginning came just after Bambi wrote his review of the Chris Rock show, which brought in a ton of people over a couple of days. Reviews are the posts that bring in the most visitors in general (because they're the post titles that come up naturally in searches), with the most viewed post being my review of the Derren Brown show. It's difficult to pick out anything more complicated from the results, because the numbers are low enough that they could be thrown off by the writers visiting a couple of times a day to check comments.

Looking at visitor numbers is reasonably meaningless, in any case, because the point of the blog is not necessarily to attract random visitors, but to give a good central place for people who know each other to write about whatever they want. And in that sense the best period we went through was probably around April or May, where there was lots of posting activity on various topics, as well as comment thread discussions.

Since then things have died down somewhat, and I've felt myself slipping back into the old routine of trying to think up filler posts to keep the blog active and prompt others into writing. This is a pity, and I'd like to try to get back into the posting frequency and quality that we had earlier this year.

And so part of this post is to ask you what you think - whether you're a writer or not, and however you're reading this. What do you think of the first year? Is it interesting, are you enjoying reading what people write on here (and if you're writing, are you enjoying writing on here)? Are you writing as much as you would like, or is there anything I can do to help you write more (or write better)?

Are other people writing about the kind of things you want to read, or should there be more thematic elements? Do you comment on people's articles and do you check the comments of older articles to participate in discussions? What have you particularly liked or disliked about the posts in the last year?

Often when there are questions like this at the end of posts, they end up not getting answered by blog readers. If you don't comment (and there are people who are reading who don't, I can see you in the visitor logs :D), or don't comment often, is there any particular reason why not? Even if you're never going to comment again, please comment on this post and say why.

What should we be aiming for for the next year? More of the same? More writers? Fewer writers? A theme?

Regardless of the answers (or lack of answers) to these questions in the comments, I've very much enjoyed everything to do with this blog in the last year - and more and more so with each additional writer added to it - and I'm certainly going to make every effort to ensure that it will still be here in another 365 days time, whether exactly the same or unrecognisably different.

If there's nothing new to read at any point - try looking back over some of the older stuff. There's some good posts that I had forgotten about back there, that I definately enjoyed reading again a second time.

Hope you all have a good Sunday, and happy birthday to us!