2014’s greatest hits

2 comments on 2014’s greatest hits
5 minutes
Blue flowers
Well liked in 2014

It’s my year-end tradition to highlight the year’s posts that were most read, commented, and liked.

But before I do that, a reflection on this year of blogging. I expanded from three to six posts a week in July, and now I wish I had done that years ago. Since then, you’ve commented and clicked Like more often. A major reason I blog is because of the positive response you give me, so thank you!

Here are my five favorite posts from 2014. I poured my heart into these, so if you haven’t read them, I’d be honored if you’d do so now.

The two most-viewed posts that I posted this year were deliberate experiments in using Google searches to bring visits to the blog. The first was this post about where to get film processed, and the second was this post about the Wolverine Super F2D film-to-digital converter. It took a couple months for Google to catch on, but now those two posts get about 60 visits a day each and have seriously juiced my total daily visit counts. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell none of those visitors have stuck around, but I suppose I should have expected that, as someone looking for advice or a product review is probably not also looking for a long-term relationship with a blog. But check out this stats graph showing the lag between the time I posted the film-processing post and when Google found it and ranked it high in searches about that topic:

Stats

The rest of the top five most-visited posts among those I wrote this year are about cameras from my collection:

  • Konica Autoreflex T3 — I’m glad this post got a lot of views because this mid-1970s SLR is a gem and deserves to be better known.
  • Nikon F2AS — Many thanks again to John Smith for introducing me to the world of pro Nikon gear.
  • Kodak Instamatic 104 and Kodak Hawkeye Instamatic — I was surprised at first to find that this post was so popular, but I guess a lot of people must find these common-as-pennies cameras in Dad’s sock drawer, wonder what to make of them, and turn to Google for answers.

These five posts gathered the most comments from you.

You clicked “Like” most often on these five posts.

Finally, just for giggles, here are the five most popular posts of all time (going on 8 years!) on Down the Road:


Comments

2 responses to “2014’s greatest hits”

  1. Carole Grey Avatar
    Carole Grey

    I really enjoyed revisiting some of the choice sites.
    Thanks and congratulations! Looking forward to your contributions in 2015!

  2. davidvanilla Avatar

    Thanks for the look at your year in review. I got a kick from revisiting these pictures and essays. My top picks:
    Photo essay: Getting ready for winter; and the “I wish Christians would stop…” essays.

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