Let's Get Meta (data).

This winter is taking it tole on my interest level in Larp. Fear not it will bounce back in spring. But writing when you have less passion for the topic seems like a bad idea. Today we're going to get meta and talk about the blog itself. There have been some odd traffic spikes. Maybe someone can figure out why?

After posting I just reread the original title of this post "Let's Get Meta" and realized that was a really dumb title for a blog about larp. Meta gaming is a huge topic in larp, and the title is totally misleading. Instead of writing about the topic of the blog, this post is about weird traffic on the blog. Sorry readers if you were hoping for a blog post about meta gaming. If you have questions about meta gaming send them my way. That should totally become a blog post.



So today I log in to start writing this weeks blog post (you can tell my passion level for larp is down a bit from normal levels because I don't have 4 articles in the queue) and noticed something odd...

So 226 page views is cool and all, but why? No posts today. Didn't say anything crazy on twitter. Maybe 40 people came over from a post about larp newbies from /r/larp. But other than that a couple hundred unaccounted for hits. The last time this happened they all originated from Israel. Which worried me because I thought I might have posted something uncouth. Real world politics stay well away from this blog, unless a larp happens to be about real world politics.

In perspective 226 is really not that big a spike. The big spike came in 2012 when I wrote about Scrumbleship. At the time it was a super promising game. Unfortunately it was quickly out paced by Space Engineers. Alas poor indy Scrumbleship, Space Engineers is getting way more play from me. Both are still in development so check them out. Scrumbleship on indieDB if you want to support indies. And Space Engineers if you're ok with a larger game company.

But all that was before turning adds off. There was a good 6 months to a year where I was actually trying to build the blog and actually make money. It was a success. I made $100 total on six months work. Not bad for something I do for free now. But definitely not a day job. That's about when Dormouse Games was kicking off. So the blog turned into a hobby blog. 

Over the course of time at Dormouse, I learned that reddit drives traffic volumes. Links and posts written to help redditors bring people over for numbers. But twitter and reddit aren't really great ways to connect with communities. Google Plus is a much better place to talk mechanics and specifics, but doesn't drive the numbers.

Next week back to larp in some form. Hopefully it's time for the snow to start melting, and for New England to start thinking about getting out and larping. I can't wait!