Review of The World of Fighting Fantasy's first year

Today it is one year since I started The World of Fighting Fantasy blog, and I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on how it's been. I'd never blogged before, so it's been a new experience for me. Let's have a look at some stats:

• Number of posts published: 34
• Total number of visits to the site as of noon today: 11,356

So that's something short of my initial target of a post per week (but see below), and that's a good number of visits to the site, over 200 per week on average. I'm pretty pleased with that, though I'd like to post more (again, see below), and I've got a long way to go before I match the number of visits at, for example, Lloyd of Gamebooks, which is currently getting nearly as many visits in a month as I've got all year!

Let's look at things a little more closely. Here's a graph showing the number of visits per month to the blog:

As you can see, after an initial burst, things fell off quite a bit, largely as a result of few posts from me on the blog, but things have climbed nicely through the year to over a 1000 views a month more recently. I'll have to make sure to produce more posts than I've been doing if I want to keep that going I suspect.

Here's a graph showing the number of visits per post (note that visitors can read posts without clicking on the links to them, which is why the figures are much lower in the following graph):

This graph shows a pretty steady number of visits per post, with some obviously creating more interest than others. A pretty obvious pattern stands out in the graph, one I'm all too aware of, and that's the fact that I produce bursts of posts with significant gaps between them. I could time post releases to get rid of this, but I prefer to let the blog reflect how I actually work and what I'm currently interested in, so I haven't done this. This also relates to the number of posts I've done this year - in 'real life', I have a pretty intense job which frequently spills over into evenings and weekends, so the time I have to post things on the blog is limited and varies according to how busy I am with work.

As for the popularity of posts, here's all of the published posts ranked by popularity:

• Mike Schley’s Inkle Sorcery! maps (10/11/2013) - 433
• Where did you say you’re from again? (31/03/2014) - 345
• The end is near ... (25/01/2014) - 335
• Another early Fighting Fantasy trilogy? (20/11/2013) - 314
• Fighting Fantasy solutions (24/11/2013) - 309
• Where on Titan is Arkand? (27/04/2014) - 301
• What does YOUR bookshelf say about you? (06/04/2014) - 253
• The Dungeoneers (23/10/2014) - 241
• The geography of Scorpion Swamp (30/07/2014) - 235
• More Fighting Fantasy LEGO (06/08/2014) - 233
• Gundobad in Khul (24/05/2014) - 23
• The geography of Ashkar the Magnificent (01/06/2014) - 227
• Other Fighting Fantasy sub-series (22/11/2013) - 226
• Fighting Fantasy LEGO! (05/01/2014) - 213
• More Fighting Fantasy maps – Steve Luxton (11/11/2013) - 210
• The ‘Stonebridge’ Trilogy? (18/11/2013) - 203
• Fighting Fantasy SVGs (27/11/2013) - 191
• Some Fighting Fantasy statistics (14/04/2014) - 185
• The Allansian Adventurer (30/11/2013) - 170
• Flaxenmane of Silverton (04/09/2014) - 164
• The demise of Rebuilding Titan (29/03/2014) - 160
• Ashkar the Magnificent (28/05/2014) - 147
• The Ximoran Protectorate and the Council of Seven (03/08/2014) - 132
• The geography of Hachiman (28/07/2014) - 132
• Deathtrap Dungeon, the computer game – available to play again! (14/11/2013) - 119
• Fighting Fantasy Characters in Focus: Beshbalik (12/11/2013) - 109
• Welcome to The World of Fighting Fantasy (09/11/2013) - 100
• Various bits of Fighting Fantasy-related news (15/05/2014) - 96
• Once more unto Deathtrap Dungeon, dear friends, once more (29/03/2014) - 94
• Transoxalia (16/08/2014) - 90
• Fighting Fantasy soundtrack (15/11/2013) - 89
• The Pit has been reopened! (25/11/2013) - 77
• Out of the Pit II – Beyond the Pit! (13/11/2013) - 68
• Central northern Khul (27/07/2014) - 51

Well, it's not that easy to work out from that what's popular and what's not, but posts involving adventurers seem to get a lot of interest, as do most of the posts on geographical analysis. Perhaps surprisingly, the two LEGO posts have done well too - I'm not sure how much interest FF fans have in this at all, but it's one of my interests and I'll no doubt return to FF and LEGO soon. Mike Schley has, understandably, proved popular, currently holding the lead by quite some way.

So what does the future hold for The World of Fighting Fantasy? Well, I'm hoping to have a bit more time over the next year to write more posts, but we'll see (and even if I do have time, FF isn't my only hobby). I'm going to aim to produce about one a week, but they may come in bursts as before, and I think I'll leave it like that, as it reflects how I work. I'd like to continue with geographical, historical and political analysis of places in Titan - I've still to finish the Khul series, and I'd like to do a series of posts considering other areas I find most interesting. I've been hoping to do some reviews too, but we'll see, and other ideas include blogging some posts from the perspective of a charcter within Titan (kind of like a travel diary maybe), more 'Characters in Focus' posts, and obviously any FF-related news I come by. Maps I've drawn from the books may also appear.

Anyway, just for now I want to thank everyone who has visited the blog and provided (the very welcome) comments on the posts - I hope the blog is doing what it's meant to do, and is providing some FF fun and interest. Let me know if you have any comments about posts, future ideas, or anything going on in the world of Fighting Fantasy that I should know about. It's a curious thing that, in 2014, Fighting Fantasy is still very much alive, even if new gamebooks appear to have dried up entirely. Let's hope the next year brings even more FF goodness!