Top Posts of 2014 Taylor Holmes Inc

Top Posts of 2014 Taylor Holmes Inc – 

I hate reading top ten lists that inevitably come at the end of the year.  Every blog from here to Tajikistan and back are running them right now.  Best underated and undetected video games of the year.  Best books for travelers for 2014.  Best paying jobs of 2014 and beyond.  Greatest overlooked vacations spots.  Marginally good, but not great kayak deals.  The Greatest Mountain trails you missed in 2014 and haven’t the endurance to get to in 2015.  You get the idea.  Not exactly sure why lists are such great click bait, but they are.  (Oooh.  Maybe my favorite underarm deodorant made the list?!)  Even some of my most frequented posts are lists… like this one, or this one, or this one.  So whatever.

But this list, this list is for me.  You just get to follow along if you’d like.  I have come to enjoy seeing what you guys enjoy most by reading back through the logs and the analytics.  Helps to shape the direction going forward.  But first before we get to the posts you liked, let’s review a few random stats about the site in the past year.  Hrmm.  How many visits to the website maybe?  Well, as of this writing, a week and a half shy of the New Year:  191,052.  (Never mind that 190,000 of them were search engine robots.)  On the top 10 most visits posts what was the average visit duration?  7 minutes and 47 seconds.    Which basically means you guys are SKIMMING, because I am WAY too verbose.  What about number of returning visitors?  22% are returning.  Which definitely means that most (all but all) of my traffic comes from gorgeous SEO goodness.  Maybe I’ll conduct a seminar on how to turn away all your friends in order to get random strangers to visit your site and never come back!  Catchy Title!  Serious SEO bling right there!

But in this past year, I have really tried to just do this thing for fun.  To quit caring about the stats.  About the drive.  And just enjoy the experience of blogging.  Oh, and to also radically increase my throughput.  About a third of the way through the year I finally figured out how to step it up a notch.  And yet, I’ve learned that increasing your content quantity does nothing for your visitors.  But your content quantity is great once they visit.  You know?  If not, never mind.  So yeah, there is no catchy SEO push with this blog that will bring in a tidal wave of people.  I know when I have a hook, and this isn’t one of them.  The point here is just to remember and take stock.

I am just going to start dropping in links to posts that were the most highly trafficked posts that I wrote this year.  No real significance as to what they are or a theme.  Just listing them from least to most.  Artists We Loved – I love finding new artists.  Love love love.  I stalk them.  I hide in the bushes until they post something new.  And this post was just one of those list posts I hate that other people do.  But it was artists that I had discovered in 2013.

Zaria Forman Paintings – One of those artists that really left an impression on me (and you apparently) was Zaria Forman.  She is the one that tends to blow your mind with ocean scenes and icebergs? Remember her?  Yeah, epicness upon epicness really is all there is to Zaria.  Her ice and snow is the stuff of legends.  And what’s even better is that she does each of her works on a very large scale, which may very well be her secret.  Who knows.  Probably the most random of posts in this list has to be Reading with Spritz.  Basically the Spritz is a system that allows you to read without moving your eyes – and subsequently radically increasing your reading speed. My first try I was sustaining 800 wpm and with practice I was even breaking over a 1000.  It’s pretty crazy to feel the words just flow into you.  Its worth trying if you never have.  I don’t generally use it much anymore because I have been waiting for iOS to support it… which it still doesn’t.  But you could be spritzing this blog right now with a javascript plugin… just click the link.  You’ll see.  And then there was my Interstellar conjecture post about what I thought Nolan’s new movie would be about.  I intended to write a follow up post, but never got around to it.  Looking back on it I predicted the problem with his script… how would they get back to earth?  Too pop culture for you?  Then what about melancholia and depression?  Great!  Then I have a list of the best mood movies for you.  In my Best Mood Movies post I walked through some of my favorite low-key movies of all time.  Her was the movie that really made me dig into these movies.  There were something like 5,000 people that have enjoyed this post so far.  There just aren’t a lot of posts like this one out there.  So it was a fun one to write.  But I probably should go add the movie Begin Again to this list – although it isn’t exactly a mood movie, but it was evocative of a mood and was very similar to the movie Once which definitely was a mood movie.

Speaking of movies, movies is where the bread and butter of my site always has been.  And it shows in the final top three posts of the year.  My third most read post, weighing in at just over 10,000 views was The One I Love.  It also happens to be the one that people are commenting and talking about the most the last week or two.  It sort of makes sense that that movie would blow up.  Its a crazy movie… and I highly recommend it.  And its hella-hard to understand the ending.  hahaha.  So yeah, if you are looking for a good movie that just came out on video – I can’t recommend that one enough.

My second most read post of the year, was also my favorite movie of the year.  Which, also apparently lost a pile of money was The Edge of Tomorrow.  I think the budget was close to $200 million?  And the box-office was closer to $100 million?  Must have been why they renamed it to Live. Die. Repeat.  half way through the run.  Which must have meant they knew the movie was sucking wind.  But I adored the movie… and we have had a great time out on that post chatting about the possibilities in that movie… as well as the ins and outs of what happened.  And with close to 20,000 page views, it was really half decent post for the year considering that the movie didn’t do that great.

And the most view post that I wrote this year?  The one that is blowing up on my analytics right now as we speak?  That position belongs to The Signal.  If you aren’t aware of the movie The Signal with Laurence Fishburne, you should check it out.  Definitely a great indie flick with a mind blowing ending.  I enjoy movies like that which make you think all the way through.  And the Signal definitely was one of those.

If I were to go and look to see how many people are on the site at this exact moment, there would probably be two or three reading that post right now.  Wait for it… I’ll check…  there are 7 people on the site currently.  1 is reading The Edge Of Tomorrow.  Another one is reading my Memento post.  2 are reading The One I Love.  And 3 are reading my Signal post.  Which is quite weird actually.  Normally, my older movie reviews get most of the reads.  (Prestige, Memento, Primer, Upstream Color, Inception, and the like.)  But now it would seem most of the traffic is shifting to newer posts

Personal Favorite?

My own favorite post of the year definitely wasn’t on your favorites list!  Not even close. Yelp Troll Reviews of World Renowned Art Galleries.  I think I spent 10 or more hours creating it and its gotten just a handful of views (as in 4.  EXACTLY 4 views.)  But just in the creation of it I laughed and laughed.  It was just so much fun coming up with the idea and developing the art etc.  And of all the posts that have the potential for getting play out on the wider internet that one is definitely it.  But it definitely isn’t in my niche.  And for something like that to get any views at all I would have to promote it out on Reddit, or on twitter, or what have you.  And I generally don’t promote my stuff outside of doing SEO.  So, it is what it is.  Sometimes you just do things because you enjoy doing them.  (Which is pretty much how I feel about ALL my work on this entire blog. I just enjoy doing it, so I do it.)

But over the course of the year, my emphasis on just writing.  Doing more posts.  And doing things that I love to do has paid dividends.

As you can see, since January 1 of this year, the site has tripled (sometimes its even quadrupled) in daily pageviews.  From like 1500 a day to upwards of 5,000?  +/-?  Which is just an added bonus. I definitely don’t post out here for viewers. I don’t necessarily post for the wider internet. Because if you look at the number of posts for the year, and the number of viewers divided by that, it’d be a minuscule number! But what I really enjoy most of all are the comments and the dialogues that are started. And in 2014 there were over 300 comments. Something like 320? And the word count of all those comments are pretty startling really. hahah. I didn’t count them up, but I’d bet they’d be a lot. Anyway. It was a good year. Thanks for joining in on the fun. And here’s to the year ahead!