Auditing my blog - my top ten posts

This week just gone, I've been revisiting Blogging Heroes by Michael A Banks. It's a swift, helpful set of interviews with some of the world's most-read, most prolific bloggers with lots of helpful advice for those people like me who are ... not quite in that league, to put it mildly.

I've drawn on its advice to do a very helpful audit of my blog; while I keep it mainly as an ongoing exercise in writing and collecting my thoughts, I would like it to gain a broader readership than at present and begin to cover aspects of my professional life as well as my personal interests.

After all, when I sit down and think about it I do have a pretty awesome job helping to support a wonderful environmental volunteer movement.

Tune in tomorrow for the advice I took from Blogging Heroes, but here's the current state of play.

The state of play

Last year I managed a grand total of 72 posts - an average of one post every five days or so. Typically each post gets between 5 and 20 views, and at least 2 or 3 of those views are probably me.

Occasionally, I do a little better, and here's my top 10 most-viewed posts since the blog began. Amusingly, if you google Butcher Babies poster I'm in the first page of Google results, which perhaps explains why I got 9 new views of a six-month old post over the past month.

Bonus Butcher Babies feature - satirical caption c...	97
The Metal Hammer Butcher Babies Poster Headdesk In...	97
Butcher Babies caption competition results	85
Creative writing snippet - Eldritch horror on the ...	81
Escape The Cheese : behold the publicity	69
Cream tea, Nick Berry and anomie on the Yorkshire ...	65
Our "at least they made the trains run on time" co...	64
Thoughts on sincerity in metal	64
The X-Factor has a socratic question for you. camp...	57
Magpiemoth's review of the year and Christmas mess...	39

 So, that's:

• Four posts about metal (and the gender politics thereof)
• One piece of creative writing
• One promoting a Valentine's fundraiser I was involved in
• Three bits of general cultural/political musing
• One personal update

 What they have (broadly) in common are:

• Some of my better writing
• Photos
• An explicit invitation to comment ... or at least an opinion to challenge
• Original content
• Have often been retweeted or Facebook-liked at least once

 Other types of posts which haven't cropped up in the Top 10

• Videos (I've been running a video of the week feature since November of last year)
• Recipes
• Photos
• Storifications
• Film and book reviews (generally SF, fantasy, arthouse)
• Examining social media and online tools in my campaigning or personal life.
• Round-ups of links, news etc

Some of these are good for as external memory, as opposed to necessarily must read posts. But, those are the kind that I don't tend to Facebook, Tweet or send around e-mail lists, in any case.