I thought that WordPress would notify me when my blog turned a year old. I mean, it sent me an amusing email containing a bunch of statistics at the end of 2010, so I figured that could happen again. But it didn’t, and here we are, approximately a year and six days removed from the day I created this blog. I say approximately because although my first post (“Before We Get Started“) went up on June 23, 2010, I’m not entirely sure that I wrote that immediately after creating this thing.
The past year and possibly-plus-but-definitely-not-minus six days have been reasonably good to it. I like most of what I’ve written, although I don’t think any of it has the brilliant sparks of mastery that some people have and which first enticed me to write. I see an unfortunately definite decline in quality over the months, which is expected considering the disparity of effort between the first couple months and more recent days. I see one body of work that I can be particularly proud of, the decade-end countdown. Incidentally, those eleven posts still produce roughly 95% of the traffic here. (If you’re wondering why I don’t do that anymore, I’ve been writing regularly for hellokpop.com; my articles are available here. End of shameless plug.) I see a sleek, new WordPress interface, in fact for the first time. (Look, I haven’t had a chance to see this screen for two months.)
On to the more interesting stuff. Because WordPress won’t do it for me, this is a snapshot of Found In Translation today:
39 posts in twelve categories have been published, with a total of 498 tags appended to them. Like I said, the decade-in-review posts get the overwhelming majority of views, referrals, Google searches, comments, and just about every other quantifiable category. If you Google “Korean top 100” or something similar (in English), chances are I’ll be at the top. Consider one small niche of the Internet claimed here.
Two of the 39 published posts are poems with bad titles. I need to learn how to title things.
The most-viewed post is “Top 100 (Korean) Songs of the Decade: #20~11“, with 1,882 views. I’m not sure why this has more hits than the #10~1 post, but that one is close behind, at 1,806. Apart from the Home Page (#3), the nine next-highest posts are all part of this series. Humorous posts tended to be more popular than serious ones, with some of my favorite non-countdown posts like “QWERTY” and “Dorm Move-In 101” ending up high on the list.
There are nine unfinished posts sitting in the lonely “drafts” bin, some dating back to July 2010. Of those, four are good ideas. One of the four will be moved to Hellokpop; two will remain unfinished, because I have completely forgotten where I was going with them and left myself rather unhelpful hints. One draft ends with this: “But the reason I bring this up is because I’m about to transition into that different topic right about now.” Thanks, younger self. The last of the good drafts might yet see the light of day. All the other drafts are completely wild ideas that would probably require the reader to be on powerful psychoactive drugs to find meaningful.
Akismet has been busy, allegedly protecting my blog from 855 spam comments. This is about eight times the number of actual comments I’ve received. Spammers are stepping it up.
This week, visitors have clicked into here from Google Malaysia, Google Thailand, Google Translate set to go from English to an Indonesian language (shoutout to K-pop fans in Southeast Asia), an unofficial Adriana Lima blog, and my friend’s blog’s comment section, among others.
Speaking of referrers, such lovely and sketchy sites as “howtomakelove.net”, “sex991.com”, and “teethwhiteninginfo.co.tv” have randomly linked here before. In a non-advertorial twist, the official website of the city of Alexandria, Virginia has also sent visitors. Twice. Wikipedia tells me that Alexandria is a smallish city of 140,000 located on the Potomac, with centuries of colonial history and a ton of government work. Not my kind of place, but hey, it sounds like you could get a stable job if nothing else.
My tag cloud is totally screwed up after the music posts, and you’ll likely get very little useful information out of it.
WordPress had pranked me a total of once. It was the only April Fools joke I fell for this year.
I’m seeing 2,205 hits logged for the month of June, a blog record. (Blogocord?)
And with that, thank you to everyone who took time out of your busy lives to read my stuff! Here’s to another year of sporadic posting, a disproportionately generous number of views, and actually remembering the blogoversary next year. Until next time, take care.
Found In Translation 