It is hard to believe that I have completed my fourth year of blogging here at Lifeintrigued. I will admit this has taken a little more effort this year due to the greater emphasis on our photography hobby. I like to post process our photo images so my readers get to view the best images possible – if you make the effort to come here I want to make sure it is worth your time. As a result I can’t just sit down and crank out a post as in the past, there is Lightroom work and the upload process to our Smugmug account to get through first before pulling all the resultant image links into the post editor. Fortunately, I still enjoy the process immensely and being able to give some background on the various photographs gives some insights into our art as well as provides a historical account to review whenever we want – priceless! But this little project is pointless without you who take the time to not only provide an audience for my ramblings but also adding your perspectives and insights through your comments. So a big thanks to all my readers and hopefully you will stick with me through 2012. As is now tradition, I am posting this summary of the year’s output.
Hit the jump to see the 2011 stats!
- According to the WordPress Stats: To Date Total Posts 323 and 236 comments
- According to the WordPress Stats: This Year Total Posts 76 and 131 comments
- According to the WordPress Stats: Total number of tags – 837
- Total blog pages this year (according to MS Word): 541
- Total number of words this year (according to MS Word): 103,100
- Post topics (some posts had multiple categories) 2011 / Total
- Birds: 5 / 48
- Fail: 2 / 5
- General: 3 / 28
- Insects: 1/3
- Observation: 51 / 223
- Phoadtography: 8/11
- Products: 6 / 17
- Projects: 7/10
- Ramblings: 1/ 11
- Recollection: 15 / 32
- Service: 8 / 50
- Uncategorized: 0 / 0
- Wildlife: 21 / 67
- WIT: 1/2
- Blogs this year by month
- Jan: 6
- Feb: 6
- Mar: 6
- Apr: 6
- May: 6
- Jun: 6
- Jul: 6
- Aug: 6
- Sep: 6
- Oct: 6
- Nov: 6
- Dec: 10 (it’s been a big month trying to get through the posts before the year end)
- Comments this year by month
- Jan: 6
- Feb: 0
- Mar: 0
- Apr: 2
- May: 2
- Jun: 23
- Jul: 12
- Aug: 10
- Sep: 20
- Oct: 6
- Nov: 12
- Dec: 38
- Posts with Most Comments
- Eagle Eyes – 10
- Goodbye Old Friend – 8
- Writing style: conversational (although some service posts took an angry tone)
- Most common grammatical error: Firefox now catches most of my misspellings, but it still doesn’t provide any grammatical checks. I do copy all my posts to Word (as a failover and I keep kicking around the idea of making a book for posterity). The benefit of this is I can leverage the strong grammar checking available in that software – although it it is always complaining about my conversational style. I also owe a big thanks to my wife who does read my posts generally before others get to it and has a knack for pointing out my English errors. I do reserve the right to make words up to fit my needs so, of course, those errors are totally planned (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it)
- Number of WordPress upgrades: 0 – Although I am behind on versions and need to get to this as soon as possible
- Number of reference links used: ?? am no longer tracking this due to being too difficult to manually count
- Number of images used: (Once again I met my requirement of having at least one image per post)
- Wildlife Photos – 160 (surprisingly a little down from the previous year but that is mainly due to keeping the bulk of the images up on Smugmug and linking to the best ones here)
- Other Photos – 340 (way up from last year which only had 101 – a lot of this due to the Phoadtography posts)
- Custom Graphics – 43 (surprisingly this about matched last year – tending to avoid this due to the extra time)
- TOTAL: 543 (wow!!)
- Languages uses: 1 (unless you count Engrish and Brigrish)
- Completed Life List Items: 6
- My biggest accomplishment of the year was finally finishing a 1/2 Marathon
- Ran the Steamboat 15K – finally recovered from a serious injury the year before
- Ran the BIX7 – (another year another medal)
- Blogging for a fourth year hitting my self-imposed 6 post/month quota
- Built a replacement bridge for the woods
- Cut another trail in the woods
- Maintained convictions: 5
- Never giving Metallica a penny of my money (still not a dime)
- Ban from RIAA backed musicians
- Not giving Sprint a dime of my money
- Kept the weight off (maintaining at 155 these days)
- Made it through the running season without significant injury (fingers crossed – the heavy training routine is producing results)
- Missed Goals: 1
- I failed to get through my reading list for the year (sigh) – note, I did finish a number of books that were not on that original list. I did make it through 13 books in total so trust me, I was trying
- Recollections:
- Books: 13
- Games: 1
- Movies: 1
- Posted 73 more items than my brother over at Dead Reckonings (he clocked in at 3 again this year) – This is a running joke, of course, since he prefers to go with this thing called “quality of post” – he definitely has me there.
- Personal Revelations:
- Still sarcastic as ever – this is a bad trait that I sure my parents are not the proudest of – luckily I have so many other great traits… riiiiight hehehe
- I think my photography skills are improving – some of the wildlife shots I am pretty pleased with and finally getting over the learning curve with the Beast.
- Politics still piss me off and based on 2012 being an election year I am warning you it could get nasty at times next year
- Service is still my pet peeve. I just don’t get it these days especially when I hear complaints about how bad the economy is after the way some of the business are treating their customer base. There are many choices in the business arena and unfortunately I have a bad experience memory like an elephant (just ask Sprint.. and now BMW)
- Continue to leverage my elective psychology classes
- Our woods is still my favorite place to spend my free time – with the bridge in place I’ve been able to focus on our back lot and have big plans for projects next year.
- Having completely retooled the body (big weight loss and a lot of training miles) it looks like I have the means to stay a little healthier through the running season – completing the 1/2 this year was a big accomplishment for me and not so much the actual event (although that was the cherry on top) but just getting to the starting line took a tremendous amount of effort – one of the life list checks that brings a big smile every time I think about it.
I hope you agree that Lifeintrigued has matured some over the previous three years. I gained some additional viewers this year (thank you thank you thank you) and held on to a number of them from the previous years. Comments were definitely up and I am very appreciative of that – a big congratulations to Ron for being the 300th commenter on this blog! In an effort to address some previous concerns I have cut down on my pre-posting and now must about all my blog posts are fresh – this has caused a small backlog of posts trying to get the newer stuff out first, but I’ll get those fit into the schedule through the course of 2012. Linda is pushing me to expand my viewer base so looks like that will be a focus for 2012.
In closing, a heartfelt THANK YOU for spending some time with me each and every month. I have already committed to 2012 which, surprisingly, will be my 5th year of blogging…an idea actually sparked by my brother at Dead Reckonings (link here) – he may not be the top scorer in Flowers, but he writes some incredible posts over there!
Have a great New Year everyone!… 2011 is in the books
An amazing year of blogging excellence! I can’t believe you maintain the quantity and quality of posts that you do. The book reviews are extremely detailed and the nature and phoadtography and bridge and Halloween photos were accompanied by extensive commentary. Over 103,000 words! And accelerating into the new year. I like the idea of gathering these into a book for posterity.
That remark about leveraging your elective psychology classes makes me a little nervous, though. On another note, feel free to pre-write posts to publish later—I was just kidding about that, of course.
Thanks very much for the references and link to my little blog yonder. I really can’t believe I posted so little this year (and the previous year), but based on the maturation of projects I’ve been working on this year, plus my backlog of essays generally, you will see significantly more posts this coming year from me. Plus, of course, my guest post here, which must be generating a lot of anticipation with the authorities. 🙂
Happy New Year!
Ron
Well.. I’ll accept the “quantity” part hehehe. I’ve been tossing the idea of the book around primarily due to wanting some way to preserve the content – even though I have backups from WordPress, the backup to Word and copies stored on my Raided NAS drive I am still not comfortable with the thought of losing 4 years worth of writing…. but then I think back to the effort involved in making Linda’s book and wonder if I have that much energy left in me… ironically I did read two blog/column collections last year, one being A.J.s Guinea Pig book.
no no, I was called out for taking a shortcut on the posting so I’ll continue to toil away into the weeeee ours of the morning using toothpicks to keep my eyelids open and splints to keep my fingers from curling up into a claw (hehehe)
yes, the anticipation of your post is growing — Unfortunately, I can’t remember your topic, was it pm Flower strategies? .. if so, they will definitely want screen shots of your top scorers.
Thanks for the comments, this year should be another fun year and I probably already have enough nature/wildlife content to last me through two or three months (the big mammals of Yellowstone are next with the Indianapolis Zoo shots queued up right behind it. We are also likely going to Hawaii this year so guessing we’ll snap one or maybe go crazy and take two shots there!
Happy New Year
Did you say you wanted a screen shot of top scores in Flowers? I’m not sure why you would want that, but let me see what I can find. Oh, here it is:
http://www.myreckonings.com/Temp/FlowersHighScores.PNG
’bout what I thought.
Ron
Ummm I’m calling “Shopped!” here – I will be bringing in some forensic scientists to investigate the pixelation of this image to refute this fictitious claim!
It’s a PNG image–no compression, no pixelation, a pure screenshot, pixel-per-pixel. The woodgrain background makes clear that there was no image manipulation. Just whistling in the dark, there. If I were going to fake the evidence, I would have done it immediately rather than killing myself over the last 4 weeks to top your scores. 🙂
Ron
You think wood grain would cause an issue to a photoshop owner, you …. wait…. did you say you spent the last FOUR weeks trying to top my scores? … as in not ONE, not TWO nor THREE, but FOUR weeks to beat two of my scores which were simply from my first two attempts at playing it? HEHEHE maybe you should let me play that a third time