The year in numbers (2011 values in parentheses):

• 5 (8) = Oddment pages posted
• 8 (9) = Road trips reported
• 52 (21) = Weeks of regularly scheduled Sunday blog posts
• 77 (31) = Total blog posts
• 76 (69) = Days on the road
• 2254 (2058) = Pictures posted — 388 (96) in the blog, 131 (141) in Oddments, and 1735 (1821) in Road Trips

Available blog statistics kind of suck. At least they do for WordPress Jetpack statistics on a self hosted blog that is only a portion of a website. One issue is that the most popular “page” is almost certain to be something called “Home page / Archives” which is a swirling mix of the multiple pages displayed at the blog’s root or the multiple pages that satisfy a search. I have AWStats generated numbers for the entire site, including the blog, but those have some problems, too. For one thing, counts include all of the individual pages appearing in the previously mentioned “Home page / Archives” many of which are not actually viewed. For another, AWStats numbers include blog page references that I’ve made myself in creating and maintaining the blog. I try to keep these to a minimum but eliminating them completely is not possible. In the end, though, I do believe the relationship of the numbers is meaningful even if the numbers themselves aren’t all that precise. So here are the top five blog and non-blog entries and I’ll follow the lists with some overall numbers.

Top Blog Posts:

1. Twenty Mile’s Last Stand
   Article on an endangered historic building that drew some interest locally.
2. The World is Singing in Cincy
   Report of my one day visit to the 2012 World Choir Games held in Cincinnati.
3. The Long Drive
   Book review posted in November of 2011 that was 2011’s top post.
4. Scoring the Dixie
   Discussion of my own attempts to keep track of what parts of the Dixie Highway I have driven.
5. Route 66 Attractions
   Review of a GPS based product for tracing Route 66.

Top Non-Blog Posts:

1. Sixty-Six: E2E and F2F
   Trip journal for Route 66 End-to-End & Friend-to-Friend trip to the festival in Victorville, CA.
2. Tadmor
   Oddment page on a 2006 visit to the ghost town of Tadmor. I believe traffic is largely from Wikipedia.
3. American Sign Museum Opening
   Oddment page on the 2005 opening of the American Sign Museum. Traffic almost certainly due the the museum’s reopening at a new location this year. A blog entry on the reopening ranked eighth.
4. Sixty-Six the Hard Way
   Trip journal for drive on US-44 and US-22.
5. Lincoln Highway Conference 2012
   Journal for trip to the 2012 Lincoln Highway Conference in Canton, Ohio.

The entire website had 91,233 visits and 337,996 page views last year which is a goodly increase from the 43,213 visits and 227,060 page views of 2011. Jetpack tells me the blog had 5,965 views in 2012 though I’m not sure if those those views and AWStats’ page views are the same.

When I reviewed 2011, I had just completed my 100th documented road trip and had made a clickable collage of the teaser images. In that post, I waffled on whether or not I would extend the collage with subsequent trips. I decided it was a good idea and completed trips are now added to the collage when they’re added to the Trip List. This is just one of the things covered in an FAQ page that was added last year. Yep, extending a collage and adding an FAQ page were the big changes for 2012. And I’m probably not going to get very jiggy in 2013 either.