Happy Birthday Yarkshire Gamer !!!!!

One Year Old

The first photo on YG was a FT-17

Well there we have it a year old this week and still going, some blogs fall by the wayside after a month but YG is still here. I had been thinking of blogging for years and had gone as far as having the Yarkshire Gamer name and getting a blogspot page, it was a mix of apathy, a nightmare shift pattern and technophobia which stopped me getting off the mark.

A search on the Internet whilst I was looking for ideas for a Spanish Civil War scenario for our little group of gamers opened my eyes to the vast amount of blogging info out there and how helpful it was and that was the spark to get going.

So a big thank you to all those who have given the blog a +1 on Google or followed me on Blogger, commented on the posts or joined in on one of the post discussions on TMP or similar.

The Legend that is the Mad Priest

The blog has provided a great personal record for me of painting schemes (I always forget what colours I used, 3 months after doing the last figure), keeping up to date with Campaigns like our current X Wing journey and keeping memories of some great games. I think even with no readers it would be worth doing. Its has been great to see my reader numbers grow and I am closing in on 30,000 hits which I'm very happy with for a first year, average posts are up nearly 5 times in the last three months compared with the first 3 so once again THANK YOU for the interest.

To celebrate (and as an excuse to re-post some of my favourite photos) I though I would do a Top Ten posts over the last year, and in true Top of the Pops stylee we'll start at No 10. All titles link to the original post.

10. Battle of Nasiriyeh Scenario 1915 - A WW1 in the East Scenario featuring Camels, Gunboats, Gurkhas and a dodgy looking bloke in a fez.

9. 1/3000th WW2 Naval From Box to Table - A tutorial on basing and painting WW2 ships, a big surprise entry for me in the top ten, Naval posts tend to get a lot less hits than other forms of gaming.

8. 28mm AWI New Unit 55th Foot and Brigade Review - A show off post with the results of my 2014 project displayed, a brigade of British using the Perrys great plastic figures. The post sparked an interesting debate on painting buttons on TMP !

7. WW2 Desert Game Beda Fomm - A write up of our go at the 1941 Desert Classic.

6. 6mm ACW Battle of Winchester - My one and only ACW write up so far proved very popular stateside and is one post that gets regular readers every month.

5. WW2 Desert Game - Another WW2 Desert Game hits the top ten, this time an engagement scenario used to test my fledgling rules.

4. 28mm Desert Rats From Box to Table - This was the first of my B2T series and its proved to be a very popular style of post.

3. AWI Battle of Guilford Court House AAR - A game report on the classic AWI battle.

2. 28mm AWI British Perry Plastics From Box to Table - The most popular B2T post, the how to guide for the great Perry Plastic Brits.

AND DRUM ROLL .............. THIS YEARS NO 1 IS.........

1. AWI Battle of Guilford Court House Scenario - The Scenario post which led to the AAR that was number 3 for the year. AWI obviously is very popular in the US and the proportion of US visitors to the site rocket when I do an AWI post. A lengthy discussion on TMP kept it at the top of the discussions for over a week so that generated quite a bit of traffic.

Site Traffic Sources - The vast majority of none direct hits come from TMP, after that Yarkshire Gamer posts on Google +, Facebook and Twitter and all those bring bits and pieces in. As does direct links from other blogs and I would like to thank those who have liked YG enough to put a link to it on their site, thanks guys and gals.

Period - Most popular but only on the back of one post was ACW, then AWI, WW2 Desert, WW1, SCW, Empire of the Dead, X Wing, WW2 Naval. No surprises there.

Type of Post Most popular was the Box to Table series by a long way, then the AAR / Scenario posts followed by New Unit show offs. Holding up the rear are the Campaign posts, we have done 2 a WW2 Naval and an ongoing X Wing Campaign. These posts although low do have a very loyal following with the same people posting, liking and asking for further updates, I have over 50 scenarios for the X Wing campaign so get used to it !

Google + I haven't managed to work out any correlation between the number of hits and the number of Google +, the No 1 + post was the Lawrence of Arabia Camels post which had double the number of + hits compared to any other post but had less than a third of the hits the Guilford Court House post got, no idea why.

Camels very popular on Google plus

So there we have it one year old, no plans to stop, I'm still very much enjoying the blogging, hope you have to. If your thinking of blogging do it !