Every year at this time I look back at the year’s most popular posts and review my stats.
Stats
Let’s start with the stats. The number of pageviews I get is a great vanity metric. I got over 28,000 more pageviews this year than last year, making this my second-best year (after 2018) on this metric. I have no idea why. I didn’t have any real breakout hit posts. As the year progressed, my average daily views just kept rising.
Comments were down again this year, however, by 14 percent. That’s a metric that matters more to me, because my great reward for writing this blog is interacting with you. Conventional wisdom is that commenting continues to decline on sites thanks to social media, but other than that I can’t explain this year’s drop.
Referrals are increasingly a big source of traffic here. These are the top five non-search referring sites this year: Facebook (at over 15,000 views, thanks to shares), Analog News (at about 2,400 views), Mike Eckman Dot Com, Casual Photophile, and Camera Go Camera (at under 1,000 views each).
These are the top five sites you visited through links on this site: Flickr (just over 10,000 clicks), Alex Luyckx Blog, 35mmc, Casual Photophile, and Photography and Vintage Cameras (Mike Connealy) (all in the ballpark of 1,000 clicks).
Posts
I always lead off with the five posts I liked best. I had a hard time choosing because I didn’t love my writing this year. I am capable of better work than I put out in 2022. But given all that’s gone on, I’m choosing to be content.
- How you live your faith can change with time — After a few years of writing very little about my faith, I wrote about it a lot this year. In this post, I reflected on the ways I have lived out my faith since becoming a Christian.
- The fog lifts — I wrote a lot about my grief after my oldest child, Rana, committed suicide at the end of last year. This is probably the best of those articles.
- Carole Ann (Frederick) Grey, 1944-2022 — Not only did I lose my daughter, but I also lost my mom. It’s been a year of staggering loss. I told Mom’s life story in thumbnail in this article.
- Walking the fine line between telling the truth and woke excess on state historic markers — A prominent historic marker was replaced on the Michigan Road this year, telling more of the road’s story, including the removal of an Indian tribe along this road. It did a good job of telling the story without a strong agenda. Such is not the case in other states’ historic marker programs.
- Tips for creating a book of photographs for sale on Amazon using Kindle Direct Publishing — After publishing three books on Amazon Kindle Publishing, I share tips and how-tos so you can get the best results when you try it yourself.
My most viewed posts from 2022 rose to the top thanks to search and heavy sharing on Facebook. Here are the top five.
- Film photography blogs you should follow — This annual post always does well.
- Carspotting 2022 — This post of old parked cars that I published just last week got shared on a couple of popular Internet newsletters, and it blew up my stats.
- Fuifilm Instax Square SQ6 — This review of an instant camera did very well, I’m sure because Instax cameras are hot.
- Building US 41 near Terre Haute in the 1920s — A Terre Haute historian sent me some vintage photos of this highway being built and asked if I could date them. I did, and told the story of how I did it.
- Minolta Maxxum 5 — My review of this camera is, as far as I can tell, the only one on the Internet. My post rocketed to the top three search results on Google, driving a lot of readers to it.
Here are the five posts you commented on most in 2022. Thank you for engaging with my writing and photography.
- Carole Ann (Frederick) Grey, 1944-2022 — You offered your condolences on the loss of my mother.
- A grave loss — You offered your condolences on the loss of my daughter.
- Fifteen years of Down the Road — You offered your congratulations on this blog’s anniversary.
- Color negative film: a niche, luxury item? — You had a lot to say about this topic. Most of it wasn’t positive.
- Figuring out how to keep my pandemic-fueled bicycle momentum going — We had a lovely conversation about maintaining old bicycles and options for new bicycles.
Thank you for reading Down the Road in 2022! I wouldn’t keep doing this if you didn’t keep reading and commenting.
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