Well, it’s that time of the year again. No, not the new fiscal year! I mean the “birthday” of this blog, Post-Punk Monk! As you may remember from last year, I was a little careless, and only acknowledged the anniversary a few weeks after I realized that it had passed. The actual date was Sunday, but I typically don’t blog on a weekend so pretend today is actually the 24th of June. I ran out of time during my lunch on Monday since my attempt to get a word count in Microsoft Word kept crashing the program – and I have 10 GB of RAM in this computer. Enough banter – what about the stats? In the last 365 days we have had:

• 168,257 words [up from 149,379 last year] – that’s an extra 107 words per post more than last year – at no extra cost to you!
• 8,518 page views [up from 5,284 last year]
• Average page views per day: 23.33 [up from 14.47 last year]
• 175 postings – I’m still managing about every other day, on par with the first year. Sure, I’d like to blog more, but that would require cash subsidization. For the record, I can be bought.
• Most popular day: May 24, 2012 with the the CD-A-Week-Project#14 from a few days earlier above the fold.  There were 233 page views on that day! This was almost triple my previous high water mark. More on why, later.
• What fun is it having a one-way conversation? It’s good readership that makes a blog! And great comments become a dialogue that often overshadow the post that engendered them. That’s how I decided to blog – when I realized that I was spending significant time commenting on ronkanefile’s blog. When your comments are 3x the copy of the blogpost – get thee to thine own blog! I’m lucky to have some regulars here that almost make up for the fact that I no longer have friends since making a radical move over a decade ago. What were the most commented on posts?

•  Well, it’s clear that ABC have a lot of love here at PPM! They have their ups! They have their downs [I still love “Beauty Stab!”] but come hell or high water, we care… so Mr. Fry… where’s that new album you are supposed to be making? That new site didn’t pay for itself.
• What are the most popular page views so far? Keep in mind that every page is the home page until it gets bumped by the next post. These named page views account for all views.

Top Posts for last 365 days ending 2012-25-06 (Summarized)

•  What were the top click-throughs for the last calendar year? The winner again, is VersionCrazy with his lovely, handcrafted examination of Post-Punk music packaging and marketing. Each time I comment there I am pleased that such a kindred spirit [record collecting-geek-graphic-designer] is doing the kind of work I would be doing, if he hadn’t gotten there first. Personal hero and industry legend [to me, anyway] Vinny Vero is the runner up. Vinny’s been busy lately and his frequency is down, but subscribe to his feed and join in the conversation with Echorich and I.

discogs.com	63
versioncrazy.com	44
vinnyvero.blogspot.com	15
alittlesign.blogspot.com	13
electricity-club.co.uk	11
martynwareblog.blogspot.com	10
radiochas.blogspot.com	8
99x.com	7
ronkanefiles.wordpress.com	7
thatperfectbeat.blogspot.com	6
theremusic.com	5
crustyoldwave.com	5

 As you may be aware, I don’t work that action too hard on behalf of this blog. In fact, it’s practically a hermit’s cave on the internet! I don’t use social media and in fact block this blog to search engine spiders. If you’ve come here, it may be down to one of four things: 

• You ran across a comment I made on some other blog/site
• You were at Vinny’s or Version Crazy’s site and saw the link and thought “what the hell…?”
• My site has been linked from the home page of Colin “Black” Vearnecombe’s website for ages now after they kindly gave me a reciprocal link for my review of his recent album “Any Colour You Like.”
• On May 24, 2012 my traffic exploded with Twitter and Facebook traffic. I don’t use those products! But Mr. Ian Peel does, and he’s the gent in charge of the ZTT archives and the man who put a link to my post on Propaganda’s “Wishful Thinking” DLX RM on that day.  Ever since then, my overall traffic has remained at least twice what I had come to expect prior to that day, so muchas gracias, Mr. Peel!

That just about wraps it up for this year. Who knows what the next year will bring. I certainly don’t, but something tells me, that if you stick around this blog, much of it will have to do with music that’s around thirty years old.

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