The year in numbers with 2023 values in parentheses:
- 7 (7) = Road trips reported
- 68 (81) = Blog posts
- 72 (47) = Days on the road
- 2,491 (2,029) = Pictures posted — 671 (866) in the blog and 1,820 (1,163) in road trips
Last year I wrote that everything went up except interest. This year even that increased with more visits to both the blog and the trip journals than in 2023. I made the same number of trips as last year but spent over three weeks more on them. That is undoubtedly why road trip pictures are up and probably why blog posts and pictures are down. There were just eight reviews published in 2024 compared to sixteen in 2023, and that is a big part of the difference. The number one post on both the blog and non-blog lists is a repeat of last year. In fact, both lists have four of last year’s entries returning this year. Could that be a sign of website maturity? Stagnation? Irrelevance?
Top Blog Posts:
- Twenty Mile’s Last Stand
This is the second consecutive first place for this post. That makes a total of five times in first and ten times in the top five. Clearly, this post about a nineteenth-century stagecoach stop destined for destruction by developers continues to attract attention. - Review: Route 66 Navigation
“Product Review — Route 66 Navigation — by Touch Media” was posted in February of 2023 and it accumulated enough visits by year’s end to rank fourth. In 2023, the Twenty Mile’s Last Stand post became the first ever to see more visits than the blog’s home page, and this year the Route 66 Navigation review joins it in outperforming the home page. I was rather impressed with the reviewed product, and hope this post has sent a customer or two its way. - My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
Since it was published in 2013, this post has appeared in the top five every year except one. In 2022, it was sixth. - Review: Every Christmas Story Ever Told
Last year I made something of a big deal of the fact that a play review (A Christmas Carol) earned a spot in the top five with only a couple of weeks to draw readers. A year previous, the review of another annual Cincinnati theatrical offering in nearly identical circumstances wasn’t even close. But in 2023, that review of Every Christmas Story Ever Told missed the list by just one position and this year moves from sixth to fourth. - Scoring the Dixie
After a second-place finish last year, this post about tracking drives on the Dixie Highway slips but hangs on for its eighth top-five appearance. As I have noted several times, I know that some visits are for the wrong (i.e., Dixie bashing) reasons but I hope that all visitors leave with the realization that the Dixie Highway was an important part of American transportation history.
Top Non-Blog Posts:
- Sixty-Six: E2E & F2F
This 2012 end-to-end and friend-to-friend drive of Historic Route 66 appears in the top five list for the eighth time and tops it for the fourth time. - Lincoln Highway Conference 2011
This trip moves from third to second for its fourth top-five appearance. It includes a full-length drive of US-36 before reaching the Lincoln Highway. - Lincoln Highway West
This 2009 trip swaps positions with the 2011 LH conference trip this year but stays in the top five for a fifth time. - Kids & Coast
Helping to make the 2024 list resemble the 2023 list, this west coast trip takes the number four slot for the third time in a row. - JHA Conference 2024
The two most recent top-five lists have included the Christmas Escape Run from the previous year. I’m sure at least part of the reason is that those posts each had a full year to accumulate hits. This year, despite its twelve-month existence, the 2023 version of that trip was edged out of the list by the 2024 Jefferson Highway Association Conference trip that took place just eight months ago in April.
All three of the main traffic measurements were up this year. Overall site visits grew from 95,651 to 164,460, blog visits rose from 4,366 to 5,236, and page views went from 651,826 to 815,886. I don’t think the increases are something to get excited about but they are encouraging or at least not discouraging, and I’m pretty happy with that.
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