Lets take a look at how my blog's been doing over the years since I first began it with a free Blogger account. It's shifted between various places since then and it's a pity I don't have screenshots that go that far back.

According to Statcounter's statistics, the number of unique visitors has pretty much tripled since last year while the number of regular readers have more than doubled. Interesting how I have over 30,000 regular readers but the comments are mostly empty but then again, I rarely leave comments too ^^;

Still I'm fairly satisfied with the growth of traffic. In fact, I'm surprised considering how it's doing better than when I used to update it daily with gaming news. It must be all the Persona posts but, the top ten posts seem to say otherwise.

The top ten posts of 2008 were the following according to Wordpress' stats plugin.

1. The FFVII: Crisis Core Desktop Accessories for Square-Enix Members Only
2. FFVII Crisis Core Finished in 14 Hours, Impressions and Hints at an FFVII Remake or Just Teasing?
3. Persona 3 Goodies, P3 FES Fanbook and Drama CDs
4. Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G Release Date and Features Revealed
5. Persona 3 Drama CD - A Certain Day of Summer
6. To Love Ru DS Dating Sim to Contain Touching Mini Game
7. 5 Centimetres per Second Novel
8. Persona 4, Naoto Shirogane and Piecing the Clues Together
9. Persona 4 OST First Press Edition
10. Nintendo DS Getting a Real Adult Visual Novel Game

A Bit of Analysis

Final Fantasy VII remains popular. Both posts knocking up close to 10,000 views with a lot people still arriving here searching for images of Cissnei and how to open that safe at the Shinra Mansion in Crisis Core. I hope it doesn't turn into too much of a spoiler thread for people!

Similarly, Atlus' Persona fan base continues to grow with a lot of people still arriving here looking for Persona 3 images. If you still haven't watched the fan illustrated P3 drama CDs, I recommend you go watch them. They're hilarious! Of course, it's best if you've played the game to understand some of the references.

A lot of the hits of late have been P4 related with people looking for the song lyrics, pairings and if Naoto's really a girl or not... I wonder out of all those people looking for the lyrics, how many have went onto purchasing the actual soundtrack even though the US pre-orders got a cutdown copy of it?

Many people have also been searching for Monster Hunter Portable 2nd's English release and have been arriving at my blog for some reason. Probably because my domain is in the UK but checking the referrals, I'm surprised people have mistaken the Japanese release date even though the images I have up are in Japanese... At least the good news for those people is the game is due as "Monster Hunter Unite" sometime in Spring in Europe.

The "adult" posts about the fake DS visual novel game and To Love Ru only managed to shoot their way up into the charts over the last three months, just overtaking the third part of the 5 Centimetres per Second novel. Seems quite a number of people are looking for official adult visual novel games on the DS.

I wonder how many people know about the 5cm novel considering the English Wikipedia entry contains nothing about it and how it contains a lot of detail not found in the movie. I can't be bothered registering just to edit the entry myself, though.

On a side note, why is it that everyone who searches for "Makoto Shinkai Artbook" from Google ends up at the covers post instead of the actual review page! Oh well, guess it'll correct itself as more people link to the proper post.

Thoughts

I will be renewing my annual subscription for the host soon and I'm wanting to do something more with this domain such as creating a more interactive site but, I don't have any ideas about what to do yet. I guess the first step is to familiarise myself more with CSS, PHP and AJAX. After that, I can see what I can do.

For now I'm unsure where this blog is heading but, I'll be working on a new Wordpress layout. I changed it slightly not too long ago but, it still looks too common using a theme someone else designed at the moment. Just browsing the web and then suddenly coming across another blog that looks almost exactly like your own doesn't feel right.

Speaking of which, I've been having some problems accessing my blog. I get time out and "500 Internal Server" error messages and, the support staff haven't been able to pin down what's wrong... Is anyone else having problems? My host Daily is guessing it might be their session time-out script i.e. I've been connected too long but I've never had this problem before. I might have to consider changing hosts.

Looking forward to how the traffic and post popularity goes this year round! Will it fall or will it rise as the content and update schedule continues to change...?