Astonishingly, it turns out I've written 200 articles on this website. That feels like an achievement. Perhaps you'd like to join me for a look back?
I've had my site since the early 2000s but back then it was a simple landing page linking to a handful of random other things I'd built. It wasn't until 2013 that I rebuilt it to more resemble the structure it has today.
I originally intended it to be somewhere I could post examples of the work I'd done, a site I wouldn't be embarrassed to put on my CV. Over time that focus has shifted slightly towards other things I'm interested in.
The real reason why I have this site at all is that I like writing. I've always tried to make sure that as much as possible on this site is my own work. It'd be far too easy to do filler material linking to other sites, and I think I've mostly stuck to that ideal.
General stuff
Here's the headline - 200 articles, just over 170,000 words. That's more than I was expecting. I've written quite a few articles over 1000 words, but only 6 that contained more than 2000. The longest article has 2601 words, the shortest article has 133.
I was going to bore you with some more numbers but instead I've decided to bore you with some graphs. Here we go!
My output clearly peaked in 2014 with a staggering 34,000 words written.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of articles per year seems to correlate with the words per year. I don't know what happened in 2014 but I was obviously either really busy or really not.
2008 is an anomaly - I only wrote one article and it was really long. Plus it was backdated from before the site started properly.
Most popular articles
According to Google Analytics, my most visited pages (apart from the homepage) since the site began are:
- How to do multiplayer in Spintires: MudRunner
- JavaScript Jigsaw Puzzle
- Making segmented circles and pie charts in CSS
- My jigsaw game (this is the actual game the article two above is about)
- jQuery Circular Progress Plugin - improved
One of the things I've always wanted to do with my site is not deliberately promote my material to see if it's possible to rank well and get traffic by simply having good content. My most popular page ranks in the top two or three Google Search results for 'MudRunner multiplayer', despite my never having done anything to promote it. I only just found that out. I'm pretty pleased about that.
Despite that, the rest of my visitor traffic proves that promotion is generally necessary, but I don't really mind. You're reading this, and that's all that matters.
The Javascript jigsaw article was something I wrote in a hurry in an attempt to impress someone at the Beano the day after I'd been for an interview there. I didn't get the job, which was good, because it meant I got a better job a little later. It remains one of the more demonstrable pieces of work that I've done. Also I learned that the sticky out bits and the corresponding holes in a jigsaw puzzle are called 'tabs' and 'spaces' respectively. Knowledge!
The rest are all semi-cool frontend things I've done, but the MudRunner article is head and shoulders above the rest in terms of traffic.
My favourites
Oooh, tricky. Let's try not to dwell on this too much, but here's a few.
I like Gaming as a Parent because I think it's quite well thought out, and also contains some good rules of thumb for games in general.
Anything on Google Maps can be reviewed is quite funny, but that's probably because I didn't write most of it.
I've enjoyed writing all of the Overdue Reviews, but the one for Dawn of War 2 stands out because it sounds like I actually know what I'm talking about. Also I managed to use the word 'eschewed' correctly.
Things that happened today - lift chronicles the true story of me getting stuck in a lift. If you're interested.
Writing about mud: Spintires MudRunner is something I'm quite proud of, because it's about me being published on a professional gaming website. It was pretty cool.
I like Does Google Maps hate Birmingham? simply because it was an interesting subject to write about. And it still appears to be true.
I like Christmas with the Animals and I am not Optimus Prime because they're surreal. Both were written before the site makeover as part of a discontinued site I called 'Brain Yak' intended entirely for things that were meant to be funny, but I brought over the best ones and back dated them. There's a few more gems hidden in the depths if you're prepared to dig for them.
I like An Honest Valentine because it's very cynical. I'm not quite that cynical, although I did write it. Huh.
Most used tags
I've tried not to have too many tags on my site to keep things tidy. My most used tags are:
- ha (45 articles)
- games (42 articles)
- portfolio (26 articles)
- movies (18 articles)
- thoughts (18 articles)
'Ha' was until recently 'Humour' until I decided to rename it after I had some doubt over whether something I'd written was actually funny or not. I wrote a lot more humour based articles in the early days, so it's surprising that games hasn't quite caught up yet (most things I write these days are about games).
Portfolio is still doing well despite not having written much for it recently (I'm not in the market for a job). I'm a little surprised by the last two, although I use thoughts as a tag on articles when I'm rambling and nothing else seems to fit. Apparently I write a fair bit about movies as well. Probably just complaining.
Honourable mentions
I've enjoyed writing a series of themed article types over the years, including things (Things that happened today, a general bucket for little snippets of stuff), open letters (some funny, some a bit ranty) and 30 day challenges. I regret not doing more of that last one, it was a good discipline. I'd also like to mention quiz and maps, for some reasonably creative content.
I very much enjoyed writing Overdue Reviews, a series of articles about old games that I originally wrote to submit for Rock Paper Shotgun's 'Have you played' series - until they cancelled it (they started it up again later, but I couldn't be bothered chasing them to see if they were still interested). A lot of them were amazingly easy to write - I drafted about a dozen of them in the space of one weekend, and I have more I haven't published yet.
By contrast, Still Game is a series I thought I'd really enjoy writing but turned out to be really difficult - it's basically writing a review for a game, which is less fun than you might think. I came up with a whole list I wanted to do but I've barely scratched the surface.
I have a tag for articles that relate to my Dad in some way, but to my knowledge so far he's not noticed it. At some point I'll have to just tell him so he reads them - many of them contain some good memories.
Experiences should have got more attention than it did. It wasn't due to a lack of material, more that I'm quite a private person and don't like to give away too much of myself. Sorry.
I've also apparently written quite a lot about Skyrim, MudRunner, and Batman. And speaking of games, I nearly forgot about My Games, a series of articles about games I've written. You can even play them. Some of them are quite good.
And of course not forgetting the original aim of my site - I've written quite a lot about CSS, Javascript, jQuery, HTML and accessibility.
Least used tags
My least used tags are:
- fractals (1 article)
- new zealand (1 article)
- nostalgia (1 article)
- ps2 (1 article)
- wordpress (1 article)
I was into fractals at university and that one article is the (slightly depressing, for me) tale of how I rewrote my final year project (the thing that took me a year) in the space of a few evenings in Javascript. For some reason I thought I'd write more about fractals.
New Zealand relates to a 30 day challenge of writing up my notes from an epic trip to the country many years ago that I thought I'd serialise on the site but never got round to.
PS2 got in at the last moment thanks to a Still Game article. I have more PS2 games I'd like to replay, but as previously mentioned those are hard to write.
I wrote about my first Wordpress site a few years ago and figured I'd need this tag but my career has swerved in a different direction so it remains mostly unused.
Most used words
Thanks to some code analysis I've discovered that my most commonly used word is 'game', followed by 'time', 'good', 'work' and 'site'. I'm not sure what to make of that.
Part of the problem was deciding what words to eliminate. Stop words like 'and' and 'or' are obvious, but what about 'think'? I couldn't decide. The rest of the list isn't much more interesting though, to be honest.
I'm not sure what I was expecting. I think I was hoping to gain some insight into my writing, like maybe I overuse the word 'torpor'. I guess my vocabularly isn't as colourful and erudite as I was hoping.
There was one interesting highlight - turned out that I'd used the word 'windows' 95 times. Well, 96 now. Hooray for coincidences.
A quick look back
I didn't want to top load this article with too many images, so here's what my site used to look like, if you're interested.
More stuff
Speaking of subsites, I still have a couple in place that I don't link to anymore because I don't update them. They still might be interesting though. Here they are just in case.
- Redundant, my short lived comic strip inspired by personal events.
- Snapd, my personal photo album. It's probably one of the cooler looking things I've built.
- Lego Heights, another comic strip, made with Lego. Of all my projects I would probably have continued this one if I'd had time.
- Lines, a surprisingly long lived blog of things I've drawn. Most of them look terrible now, but there's a few decent bits.
What's next
I'm not sure, honestly. I was thinking of taking a break - there are plenty of other things more deserving of my attention than this little website that hardly anyone reads. I do enjoy writing though, and interesting things still happen to me and are worth posting about. I might take it all a bit less seriously though. It's occasionally bordered on being a chore, and it's definitely not worth that.
Thanks for reading. Maybe I'll see you again sometime in the future. Oh, and in case you were wondering, here's my 100th article. I completely didn't notice at the time.