Hard to believe, but we’ve been exploring Bobcat Territory for almost eight years now. We inaugurated this fine blogcat back on April 20 (natch), 2012. While it’s a little early to be celebrating our anniversary, I decided this would be a fine time to take a look over the site and give a little breakdown of how things have been going. For once, we are going to use analytics on something other than pong!
As I said, we started the site in April 2012. Between then and now, there have been 93 months and 149 published blogcats, giving us a nice tidy rate of 1.6 blogcats per month. But in those early days we were a little ambitious about our ability to sustain regular output; we did not settle into our current once-per-month format until February 2013. In the first 10 months of Bobcat Territory, we published 41 blogcats, a rate of 4.1 per month! In the ensuing 82 months, we’ve published 108 blogcats, a rate of 1.32 blogcats per month. In all that time, there has only been a single month (June 2019) in which we neglected to publish a single blogcat.
How has the work been distributed? You probably wouldn’t know it from reading, but there are six founders of Bobcat Territory. Here we have the number of blogcats written by each one.
Josh (Turtle Time) – 90
Ryan (The Quarry) – 37 (not including this one)
Ezra (The Patdown) – 13
Jason (Never Mind) – 5
Mark (Parasites) – 3
Pete (uh … just Pete, I guess we never did give his blogcats a name like the rest of us) – 1
If we clear out the pre-February 2013 posts as we did above, here’s how it breaks down:
Josh – 68
Ryan – 29
Ezra – 10
Mark – 1 (on March 18, 2014)
Pete – 1 (on August 31, 2018)
Jason – 0 (c’mon man)
Josh is the clear Blogcat MVP, although we can reduce his lead slightly since it is inflated by being listed as the author for most of our Pong Pods, which are really collaborative pieces between Josh, Ezra, and myself. But that still gives him somewhere in the 50s, depending on how you count some of our collective pong posts.
Speaking of pong, we have 34 published pieces, or 22.8% of our total output, that at least mention pong. Though we have a couple of early pieces (e.g. Josh’s Beirut Blogcat) that aren’t as solely dedicated to the game as some of our more recent output. The Brother Pi Breakdown was the first in our series of pong analytic/analysis/deep dive blogcats, published on July 3, 2013. If we just look at all of our pieces since then, we have 28 dedicated exclusively to pong in some fashion out of 98 blogcats, which is 28.9%. The only other topic we discuss with similar frequency is television; we have 22 pieces that are somehow tagged as being about TV (though there may be a few more that weren’t tagged).
Unfortunately, since we have been somewhat neglectful webmasters, our version of WordPress is out of date and thus we currently don’t have access to any of the juicier site analytics like number of views and so on. I will work on updating that and getting some more interesting deep dives into the site, including figuring out our most viewed blogcat, for our 8-year anniversary on April 20, 2020. For now, though, congrats to Josh on making Turtle Time our most prolific blogcat! And maybe if we decide to give Pete’s columns a name like the rest of ours it will encourage him to post a bit more and make a late-career run for the blogcatting title.