The year in numbers with 2015 values in parentheses:
- 7 (9) = Road trips reported
- 69 (77) = Blog posts
- 90 (59) = Days on the road
- 2418 (1926) = Pictures posted — 323 (490) in the blog and 2095 (1436) in Road Trips
The trip count was down a little but one of them was a duesy. My 41 day 11,000 mile trip to Alaska broke all previous time and distance records and pretty much accounted for the jump in total days on the road all by itself. Pictures posted increased accordingly and posted road trip pictures topped 2000 for the first time. I did not break the 1000/trip mark however. My count for Alaska trip pics is 999. In addition to the 52 regular weekly blog posts, there were 8 reviews, 7 road trip links, and 2 miscellaneous asynchronous posts. After having three of 2015’s new blog posts among the year’s five most popular, this year saw no new posts in the top five but it was close. The most visited post in 2016 missed being published in 2016 by twenty-six days. I’ve no choice but to consider that close enough and declare it the top new post. On the other hand, after two years with none, a pair of newly minted entries appear in the the non-blog top five.
Top Blog Posts:
- Dancers and Prancers
This was a late 2015 post made as a report on the Lebanon, Ohio, Christmas horse parade. The majority of pictures in the article were of horses and carriages but I don’t think the majority of traffic came from horse lovers. Cincinnati’s Red Hot Dancing Queens are responsible for half of the title and much of the traffic. I really enjoy seeing this group perform and obviously a lot of other people do too. They have been invited to participate in this year’s Krewe of King Arthur Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. Learn more and maybe even make a donation here. - My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
With two firsts and two seconds, this post has made the list every year of its existence. Unfortunately (from my point of view) most of the visitors seem to come from fairly specific searches and have no interest in anything else on this site. - Blog View — This Cruel War
This September 2015 entry is a description of and invitation to a Civil War related blog that launched two weeks earlier. I hope that some of the traffic that put the post in the top five during its first full calendar year also led to some subscribers for the exceptional This Cruel War blog - My Wheels – Chapter 2 1948/9 Whizzer
Appearing back in 2013 about a month after the J.C. Higgins Flightliner post, this is the first time this post has made the top five. Maybe some of the Flightliner fans are moving onto motorized transport or maybe there is an entirely separate group. - Route 66 Attractions
After three years in the top five, this 2012 review dropped off last year but squeezes into the final slot for 2016. The subject is a GPS based product for tracing Route 66.
Top Non-Blog Posts:
- Bi Byways
This was the number two post for 2015 and something made the twelve year old trip journal even more popular last year. In 2015 both days of the two day trip got about the same amount of traffic but in 2016 day two had a clear edge. This belies my secret theory that the traffic was from people looking for US-66 (then being disappointed when they were served a story about OH-66). My drive along the length of Ohio State Route 66 occurred entirely on the first day so I’m back to not having even a secret theory. - The 2010 Fair at New Boston
This Oddment page about a visit to an annual recreation of the 1790s always gets a few visits around fair time which is Labor Day weekend. This year it apparently got more than a few. It was also in the 2013 top five list at number three. - Alaska
The journal for that record breaking trip to Alaska made the middle of the list. Even if it is partly because there is just so much of it, I’m encouraged by new journal entries appearing to the top five. - Road Crew in the Fork
This was the first road trip of 2016 so it had the most time to accumulate views. The Road Crew is a Nashville based band known for their Route 66 related songs and concerts. I suspect the popularity of this post has something to do with their fans and their Route 66 connection even though the targeted Road Crew performance was snowed out. - Lincoln Highway Centennial Tour
Prior to this year’s Alaska outing, this 35 day coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway drive had been my longest trip. It happened in 2013 and appeared on the list at number four that year. It would be wasteful of me to miss this opportunity to mention that this trip was the subject of my first book, By Mopar to the Golden Gate, available here.
I quickly became convinced that 2015’s huge drop in visits was directly connected to search engines (particularly Google) rewarding mobile friendly sites and this site’s complete lack of any mobile considerations at all. I set out to fix that and within a couple of months had made the site “mostly mobile friendly”. Two blog posts, 2016 on the Small Screen and Mobile Friendlier, talk about the project. The website was certainly made better by the changes and they may have headed off the loss of even more traffic but they did not return things to their previous levels. Overall traffic numbers were mixed with visits dropping from 113,142 to 107,898 and page views climbing from 462,171 to 579.110. Blog views dropped from 9,191 to 8,136.
The final paragraph of last year’s “Rear View” article, written before the mobile-friendly issue was understood, considered the idea that the popularity of independent personal blogs and journals had peaked and would proceed to decline. The last sentence, following the observation that this website had never been a big player, was “It will, however continue to be the same small player it always has been.” The semi-level traffic statistics offer at least some hope that that’s true.