The year in numbers with 2016 values in parentheses:

• 9 (7) = Road trips reported
• 73 (69) = Blog posts
• 66 (90) = Days on the road
• 1896 (2418) = Pictures posted — 284 (323) in the blog and 1612 (2095) in Road Trips

Things are more or less back to normal after last year’s extra long (and extra exotic) Alaska trip boosted the days and pictures counts significantly. The number of blog posts was nudged upward by 2017 having 53 Sundays. The regular weekly posts were augmented with links for the nine road trips and eleven reviews. In a flip-flop from last year’s summary, two new-for-2017 blog posts made the top five while no new-for-2017 trip journal entries did. The Hawaii trip was closest at number ten.

Top Blog Posts:

1. Remembering Timmy
   The most visited post of 2017 was also the saddest. Musician and friend Tim Goshorn died in mid-April just weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. Tim and brothers Larry and Dan put the Goshorn name in the top tier of the Cincinnati music scene and Tim and Larry became nationally known as members of Pure Prairie League. That fame and the fact that he was just such a wonderful person had a lot of people sharing memories on the internet. In this post I shared some of mine.
2. My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
   The first post in the My Wheel series maintains its perfect top five record with a third second place ranking to go with two firsts. Visitors appear to continue to come through specific searches with no interest in anything else on this site. But I still appreciate them.
3. Book Review — The World from My Bike
   This is the other 2017 post in the top five. It’s a book review that is here due to the author’s popularity and because she shared the review with her own followers. Anna Grechishkina is not yet a famous author but she is becoming well known as a traveler. This is her first book and it’s filled with photos and thoughts from her not yet complete motorcycle ride around the world. It’s certainly impressive and I’m betting there will be at least one more after she completes her journey and is back home in Ukraine.
4. Scoring the Dixie
   This post about keeping track of driven sections of the Dixie Highway placed fourth when it was published in 2012, was third in 2015, and is back at fourth for 2017. I’m sensing a slow increase in interest in all old roads including the Dixie Highway. In the year’s closing months, there was even a slight uptick in the popularity of my own Dixie Highway related book, A Decade Driving the Dixie Highway, as sales rose from abysmal to anemic.
5. Ohio’s Revolutionary War Battle
   This 2012 post appears in the top five for the second time. In 2013, when it ranked fourth, I attributed its popularity to the bicentennial of the War of 1812 and the post’s mention of names associated with that war. This year I have no theory at all.

Top Non-Blog Posts:

1. Ohio Barn Dance
   Both of this year’s top two non-blog posts are mysteries to me. The most visited journal entry is a rather simple 2007 day trip on some scenic southern Ohio roads. The name comes from the fact that several old barns were passed along the way. In researching 2017 statistics, I discovered a big goof. Trip Peeks are blog posts that I publish when I have nothing better. Each one references the journal of a randomly selected road trip. A Trip Peek for Ohio Barn Dance was published in 2017. In fact it was published twice. First on October 22 and again on November 26. How that happened I don’t know but it did. It’s tempting to say the journal traffic is the result of the double posting but it clearly isn’t. For one thing, Trip Peeks never generate enough interest to account for anything near what this entry saw. Besides, the surge appears to have started back in April long before the first Trip Peek posting.
2. Bi Byways
   I don’t understand this 2004 two day trip coming in second in in 2017 any more than I understood it coming in second in 2015 or first in 2016. The byways involved are the Miami and Erie Canal Scenic Byway and the Maumee Valley Byway and all of OH-66 is included.
3. Tadmor
   This is an Oddment page about an Ohio ghost town. After ranking first, second, and first in the first three “Rearview” posts (2011, 2012, 2013), it dropped out of the rankings but reappears for 2017.
4. Alaska
   The journal for that long 2016 trip to Alaska was number three last year and hangs on to number four this year.
5. Finding It Here
   This was a three day Christmas Escape Run that never left Ohio, but it was the last trip of 2016 so had all year to accumulate enough views to claim fifth place.

Once again, overall traffic numbers were mixed. Visits, which dropped slightly last year, increased from 107,898 to 138,047, while blog views dropped again, going from 8,136 to 7485. Page views were nearly unchanged with 579,110 for 2016 and 578,893 for 2017.

Though it didn’t make the top five, the highest ranked new journal entry, My Fiftieth: Hawaii, marked a significant real word milestone for me. As the title suggests, reaching Hawaii meant I could now claim to have visited all fifty states of the union. It also provided a pretty good reason to write another book. That book, 50 @ 70, celebrates reaching fifty states and seventy years of age at the same time. Unlike my previous two books, 50 @ 70 isn’t associated with a particular road (or any thing else) so doesn’t even get attention from niche road fans. Sales need to increase a bunch to be considered abysmal. Anemic is probably out of range. 

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:

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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
4. 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.
5. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

The year in numbers with 2014 values in parentheses:

• 9 (7) = Road trips reported
• 77 (80) = Blog posts
• 59 (77) = Days on the road
• 1926 (1972) = Pictures posted — 490 (384) in the blog and 1436 (1588) in Road Trips

I made a couple more trips this year than last but they were shorter and resulted in less total days on the road. That naturally caused a slight drop in pictures posted to the journal but pictures in the blog increased so that there was not a significant change in the total number of new pictures. In addition to the 52 regular weekly blog posts, there were 14 reviews, 9 road trip links, and 2 miscellaneous asynchronous posts which adds up to just three less blog posts than last year. Three of the new blog posts generated enough traffic to make the top five. The most popular new blog post concerned a little ol’ high school reunion. Once again there were no new posts in the non-blog top five.

Top Blog Posts:

1. My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
   After being the most popular new post of 2013 and that year’s second most popular overall, this first chapter in the My Wheels series moved to number one last year and stays there for 2015. Any doubt that web cruisers prefer single-speed fat-tired bicycles over Corvairs and Vegas is rapidly fading.
2. Fifty Years After
   This was itself a “rear view” article triggered by the fiftieth anniversary reunion of my high school graduating class. Not surprisingly, a lot of my classmates read it but there isn’t enough of them to account for it being the most popular new post of the year. The article was hardly an in depth look at the past half-century but it did offer a glimpse at coming of age in the 1960s and that apparently caught a little interest.
3. Scoring the Dixie
   I am guessing that this 2012 article on how I was tracking my on going efforts to drive the entire Dixie Highway got some extra attention this year due to it being the centennial of the Dixie Highway Association’s founding. I completed the drive in July and published a book about it (A Decade Driving the Dixie Highway) in November. I’d like to think that that had something to do with the spike in visits to the article but dates and numbers don’t really support that.
4. Twenty Mile Stand Two Years On
   The J. C Higgins Flightliner article was denied the number one slot in its first year by the demolition of a nearly two century old road house and an earlier article about hopes to save it. This update published on the second anniversary of the demolition was the second most popular new post of 2015 and the fourth most popular overall.
5. Much Miscellany 2, Sloopy at 50
   This is the third new post to crack the top five and, like the number one new post, it concerns an event from fifty years ago. On October 2, 1965, the McCoys’ recording of Hang on Sloopy reached the top of the charts. On September 12, 2015, the McCoys’ singer and lead guitarist performed the song back in his home town of Union City, Indiana. In fact, all three surviving McCoys were on stage for a one song reunion. Union City sits on the state line near where I grew up and, although we weren’t classmates, I knew all of the McCoys during our high school years so this and the Fifty Years After post have more in common than one might think.

Top Non-Blog Posts:

1. PA Potpourri
   This four day trip is from June 2005. The big winner was the trip’s cover page which mentions, among other things, Madonna of the Trail monuments, the Lincoln Highway, the Johnstown flood, and the Centralia coal mine fire. Traffic for the individual days was fairly even although day one, which included the visit to Centralia, had a slight edge. A time capsule, noted in the post and scheduled to be opened in 2016, was prematurely opened in October 2014. That is possibly what brought visitors here in 2015 but it is hardly better that a pure shot in the dark.
2. Bi Byways
   Again it was the cover page that got all the attention with both days of the August 2004 trip getting roughly the same amount of traffic. The bi byways of the title are the Maumee Valley Byway and the Miami and Erie Canal Byway. Both are completely in Ohio and the Miami and Erie Canal Byway is completely contained in Ohio’s Route 66 which I drove end-to-end on this trip. I have absolutely no idea what attracted visitors to this trip last year.
3. Lincoln Highway West
   This 2009 trip is the only repeat from last year and again the focus is on a day in Iowa.although all other days of the trip got some attention, too. Maybe it’s the Lions Club Tree Park or the Moss or Gregory markers that’s pulling them in but I like to think that it’s the chicken mailbox or the Ogden Footprints.
4. US-62’s East End
   This outing occurred a month before the Bi Byways trip which makes it the oldest in this year’s top five. It was visits to the cover page that got it here and all days, including two pre-trip days, were about equally popular. I can’t guess at what the big attraction was but will mention that the Little League Hall of Fame panels for Dan Quayle and Bruce Springsteen did get some looks.
5. Sixty-Six E2E and F2F
   This July 2012 trip is the newest in the top five. It is my most recent end-to-end (E2E) drive of Historic Route 66. I’d come to know a lot more people on the route than on the 1999 and and 2003 full length trips so it was also friend-to-friend (F2F). There is nothing to indicate what brought on the recent attention but I don’t question the trip’s worthiness at all.

Overall visits to the website dropped and dropped dramatically in 2015. The 248,033 visits of 2014 fell to 113,142 last year and page views fell from 741,404 to 462,171. Blog views rose from 8,062 to 9191. That massive 54% drop in the number of visits is scary. Annual traffic counts have dropped before but not to that degree.

So what’s that mean? One possibility is that a change in the way statistics are compiled or visits detected resulted in an artificial drop in the numbers and I can produce some arguments both for and against that theory. The “for” ones are the weakest. What seems more likely and less palatable is that the numbers don’t lie and readership has truly plummeted. Jim Grey, a friend and popular blogger, recently posted an article he called Welcome to the post-blog era. In it he discusses perceived changes in visitors and their engagement. Jim is not really suggesting that his own blog is dead. 2015 was the busiest yet for him. (Note that my own blog’s visits increased 14% last year. It is overall website visits that have tumbled.) What he is suggesting is that the internet landscape has changed and blogs, specifically independent personal blogs, are not at all the big players they once were. Maybe independent anythings, including road trip journals, aren’t big players any more. Not that this one ever was. It will, however continue to be the same small player it always has been.

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.