hooby.blog celebrates it's first year of existence
The hooby.blog went live on the 25th of January, 2025. But it did so with a number of pre-existing posts, dating back several months. When I rewrote those prior postings into blog posts, I kept the original publication date - and that’s why there are posts going back into early 2024, despite the blog not even existing prior to 2025.
44 Posts Written
During this first year, I wrote a total of 44 posts (45 with this one), covering quite a few different topics and of varying length. The average post comes in at 2821 words, and the longest post measures a whopping 8163 words! In total, I wrote 107198 words (not including this post).
Thousands Of Visits
I only added Goatcounter (a highly GDPR friendly visitor-counter that doesn’t record any personal data whatsoever) in August 2025, therefore I do not have accurate visitor numbers prior to that. But the blog did attract 1000+ visitors (and many, many more bots) just since August - thus I’m feeling confident in that “thousands of visits” claim.
The Most Popular Posts
Despite not having accurate visitor numbers before August, I still do know roughly what was going on earlier from checking access logs every now and then.
First Place:
The most visited post by far was What you need to know about Stars Reach - and that comes down to Raph Koster sharing that link on social media, which lead to 150+ visitors upfront, and a long tail of re-shares and later visits. I like that posts and think it’s one of my better written ones - so totally go check it out, if you haven’t read it yet.
Second Place:
Designing a TTRPG Combat System is a slow-burner. It got just two or three visitors when I originally posted it - but it then went on to accumulate more visitors week after week (mostly coming in through search engines), until it organically became the second most popular post I’ve ever written. Which makes me happy, because writing that one was a ton of work and took weeks.
This post is one of a three part series, in which I am working on my own game rulebook:
And all three are doing well. Die Rolls holds technically the third place in visitors (but I’m counting it as part of this series, not it’s own entry in the top 3). The second combat post doesn’t have that many visits yet - but it’s on track to rival the first entry over time. It just hasn’t had enough time to accumulate visits yet. As I said: slow-burners.
Third Place:
The Stars Reach Pre-Alpha Test Reports are an ongoing series of posts that gain around 20 to 30 visits when posted, but don’t have much of a long tail. One of these (not even a particularly good one) got featured in a Stars Reach newsletter, which brought in an extra 30 visitors within mostly 1 hour of the newsletter being sent, and no longer tail at all. Still enough to securea solid third place.
Honorable Mentions
Here’s a few more recommended posts for you, if you are interested in reading some of my thoughts on MMORPG video game design:
Here goes to next year!
There’s definitely more to come in the future, so stay tuned. But for now: Have some relaxed holidays, and a happy new year!
Cheers.