Well, here it is. I’ve been at this for a year now, and like almost everyone, it’s time to take a look at the year just ended. It’s nice that WordPress sent me a summary of my blogging activity, though like all others in the media, they didn’t actually wait until the year was fully over to compile it.

I understand that news magazines need to go to press well before the end of the year in order to have their issues out on the newsstands in time, but it’s got to be annoying that any major news items that happen in late December won’t get included. Forget about making the lists of “Celebrity Deaths of the Year” if you die in the last few days of the year. Of course, you cannot be included in the lists for the next year, so you’re stuck.

Anyway, here’s what WordPress has for my annual report.

I posted 70 items. That’s more than the one a week I was hoping for. It was mostly my decision to participate in the Countdown to Halloween that was responsible. I put up a dozen posts in October.

I got a total of 999 page views. Most of them were probably mine….

Here’s the five most viewed posts:

People from all over the world (well, 59 countries) have stopped by. Obviously, the United States is where the most visitors (553) are from. For some reason, Brazil is next with 193, followed by Italy with 39. There have been one visit each from twenty-six countries (Hello Nepal!!).

I’ve got 24 followers. A few of them just might be automated bots. If you are a real person following this blog, stop by and say Hello in a comment!

My favorite posts? I’d have to say I had the most fun making the two “Small Screen Scares” posts (published 10/13 and 10/16) for the aforementioned “Countdown to Halloween”. They looked at the men and women who composed the theme music for “spooky” TV shows. The one that took the most work was “Because You’ve Already Forgotten Them” (published 3/3), in which I created a slide show video for every gold medal winner at the Sochi Olympics. You try tracking down good photos where you can see their faces of over 90 athletes, identifying the athletes in team photos, adding captions to each one, and then assembling a video to appropriate music… The one I feel the most proud of is “Pitching, Pine Tar, and Philosophy” (published 4/28), where I went from a discussion of a baseball rule to talking about the philosophy of law. That one was fun!

When I started this blog, I figured that there would be times when I felt I needed to get a post up, but would be short on ideas. So I created a list of “In Case of Emergency” topics, and wrote a few posts in advance to give me a backlog. Well, I’ve only needed to use a few of those “emergency” topics, and my collection of “backlog” posts is even larger now. I’m not going to flood this place with them all – far from it. But it’s nice to know I can keep to a fairly regular once-a-week schedule.

See you in 2015!