Happy Birthday to The Daily Frostwolf! 2 years old today!

You know what's weird?  There are a lot of blogs I follow which have also just turned 2.  I could have sworn those blogs had been around for AGES. But now the Daily Frostwolf is 2!  Happy Birthday Daily Frostwolf!

2 years means 2 cakes.  Nom nom nom.

Last year I forgot my one year blogaversary.  But this year I'm not going to forget!

I first started this blog as a reminder to myself of things that I wanted to remember.  Gear lists.  Raid kills.  Funny things that happened.  The only people that read my blog back in those days were my close friends and guildies.  I think 4 people used to read my blog.  Those were my blog's first steps, blog infancy.  Some of my posts were just silly, and I used to post sporadically.  In fact, someone said my blog title was a misnomer - there was nothing DAILY about it.  After that comment, I made the effort to post every day.  In two years I have made just over 500 posts - a lot of those are mini posts and screenshot posts from participating in shared topics, but still, crazy number of posts just the same.  I remember Jamin from Shattered Beginnings talking about needing to catch up on his feed reader, and told me that I was one of the worst offenders for making the unread list long.  That made me grin (though that was just last year).

 

Then I was a blog toddler.  It was my second year of blogging.  I would look at my early posts and cringe about my writing style.  And the lack of pictures.  Now whenever I post, I feel like I MUST put a picture there, or it's just an ugly wall of text.  And I no longer just write for myself, even though I should, because now I know people are reading what I write, I have to watch what I say so that I don't offend anyone, but it's still easy to get my message across if I have something to say.  I think by now I've settled into a routine and a flow in my writing (like Mondays are guildie guest sposts, Wed/Thurs/Sun/Mon are raid recaps, Saturday is Rares for the week and Sunday is Favourite posts from around the Blogosphere).

So what are my most popular posts in my second year?

1. Not surprisingly, a lot of people search google for resto druid gear, so my resto druid gear post for 4.2 was the most popular post of all time.  The 4.3 post is slowly catching up though and probably by the end of Dragon Soul, it will be equal to the first post.  Though it's not very comprehensive, I made it more for myself really so I can flick back and look at gear which I am supposed to be getting.
2. The second most popular post was my Good Old Days Shared Post, which was featured on WoWInsider.  I wish I had worked harder on that post, it seemed to pale in comparison to the other blogs featured on that day!
3. The third most popular post was my post about the Firelands Trash.  I remember writing that because we had such trouble with trash on that first day!  And I wrote about how we dealt with some of the hard mobs - maybe that's what people were looking for at the time too.
4. The fourth most popular post was my first comments on Transmogrification.  It was a really boring post.  I don't know why people keep looking at it.  I only featured Rogue Tier and Druid Tier sets on it.
5. The fifth most popular post was actually my favourite post.  It was the first rhyme that I did, the Horde Alphabet book for my daughter.  I am very proud of that post, and I remember the day I wrote it, it was one of those days you feel really creative and inspired and the words just seem to flow through your fingers from the keyboard to the screen.  And I went around looking for pictures to dress it up and I thought it all went rather nicely.

And a couple of statistics...

In 2 years I have had just over 40,000 page views (thought that's really been quite exponential in the last 6 months... last month I had 10,000 page views) and 571 comments (though half of them are probably me replying to my comments!).  Famous druid bloggers like Jasyla and Angelya have even visited my blog (I know I know, I'm such a fanboy/girl!!) and I've met so many people and been introduced to so many blogs through the Blog Azeroth community.  And Twitter... I know it increases traffic for my site and I use it to promote my site (and my friends' sites)  and keep up with what the latest gossip is around Azeroth, but the damn thing is addictive and when I try to stay away, I end up with 300 unread updates and then I'm stuck in it again...

So as a birthday gift to my blog, I commissioned a new banner.  It won't be ready by the actual 2nd birthday, but it's better late than never, right?  And the second gift to my blog, is the facelift that it's been undergoing over the last 2 weeks.

But I would like to give a small present to my readers.  I'm not really good at anything except taking silly pictures and making rhymes and puzzles, so for every one who replies to this post, I will make a small poem or a picture or a puzzle about them as a thank you for your support through the years.  Obviously the other good thing is, if nobody replies this post then I won't have to write any puzzles because I have no readers, and everyone just reaches here from google.

So thank you to everyone who reads my little blog.  You know who you are!  And if you reply this, then I'll know who you are too :)