Today is the day I hit the mark.

WordPress.com has confirmed.

I have been blogging here for 20 years.

The annual WP.com greeting

It is time once again to recap.  This post guaranteed to contain at least 17.7% new content by volume.  Also, I am avoiding AI and proving it by using my awful Canva banner for this celebration.

20 Years… see what happens when you let me use Canva?

That said, I was tempted by AI because I am not sure I could out-do its ability to churn out a really bad design.  This one, for example, which I almost went with.

In the end I decided to leave that by the wayside as this week is more about words than images.

Fortunately one problem I rarely have is coming up short on words.  Spelling them correctly or placing them in the right order… those problems I have.  But simple word count, usually not an issue.  And all the more so when it comes to anniversary posts, of which this is the 20th, though I have managed to spread this all out over three days of posts, so maybe this won’t go as long as usual… though, glancing down the page I seem to have failed on that front as well.

If, for some reason, you feel the need to “collect” the whole set… and I don’t even know what that would actually mean in this context any more than I know what it means that this is a “collector’s edition” post… here are links to past annual ventures.

  • 2007 – A Year of Living Noobishly
  • 2008 – Two Years Below the Masthead
  • 2009 – Three Years We Grew in Virtual Sun and Shower
  • 2010 – Four Years In, No Further From Noobdom
  • 2011 – Heroic Results of the First Five Year Plan
  • 2012 – But Now I am Six, I’m as Clever as Clever
  • 2013 – The Seven Year Kvetch
  • 2014 – Eight Years of Link Rot
  • 2015 – Nine is a Magic Number
  • 2016 – A Decade Under the Influence of Online Games
  • 2017 – Elf
  • 2018 – The Dozens
  • 2019 – The Thirteenth Floor
  • 2020 – Condition Report for the Fourteenth Interval
  • 2021 – My Blogging Quinceanera
  • 2022 – Sixteen Years of Driving the Blog
  • 2023 – A Subdued Seventeenth Blog Anniversary
  • 2024 – Eighteen is the Current Count
  • 2025 – Nineteen Years of Shifting Goals

That list of posts is like a microcosm of the life of the blog.  It started out hopeful and often a bit “try hard,” occasionally coming within inches of grasping onto clever, before settling down to a regular cadence of reporting on what I was playing, remarking on some aspect of video game news, and rehashing the same old opinions I’ve espoused all along whenever the moment made them even tangentially relevant once more.

But who is the bigger fool?  The fool who spends 20 years writing a grousing manifesto about video games or the fool who actually reads it?

Also, I am not sure what that had to do with anything or if made any sense.  It just sounded good when I said it aloud in my office a few times with a dramatic intonation.  The cat looked at me funny, but that was due to my disturbing his nap most likely.

The Basic Stats

Due to me needing to write this in advance, stats are cut off at September 7.  The missing 5 days are less than a rounding error 20 years into this.  In parenthesis are the diffs from last year, or notes where needed.

Days since launch: 7,300 (+360, because of the early cut off)
Posts total: 7,957 (+385)
Total Words: 7,306,525 (WP.com calculation)
Average words per post: (+23)
Post Likes: 27,064 (+1,770)
Average posts per day: 1.090 (-0.01… I continue to slow… slowly)
Comments: 41,268 (+1,200)
Average comments per post: 5.18 5.29 (-0.11)
Average comments per day: 5.65 (-0.12)
Comments written by me: 8,588 or 20.8%
Space used by images: 5.3 GB used, 7.7 GB (59.3%) upload space remaining.
Blog Subscribers: 3,711 (+188, mostly bots)

I have tracked other stats over the years but… well, I am not sure how much value even the remaining ones have, so the number of prime ministers Italy has had over the last 20 years seemed pretty expendable.

Data Unfiltered

For those who want to stare at even more numbers… well, this is for you!

I’ll open up with the page view totals by month and year, as provided by WordPress.com.

Year 20 – Page views by month

You’ll probably need to click on that to see the full details.  WP.com used to provide a better chart, one with full numbers.  But the kids there don’t like data, they like things that have colors because they never have to deal with any data I guess.  Still, you can sense a pattern, with a ramp up in views to a peak in 2012, then a long decline, with a brief recent resurgence.

To better visualize this I have a chart that just shows the annual page view totals.  I usually put up this chart with only full, 12 month years, which means 2007 to 2025 in this case.

TAGN Page View Traffic by Full Years – 2007 through 2025

Some of that is explicable if you just know what was going on with the internet.

Google was pretty generous to small sites until they made a change in 2013.  Mostly that affected traffic from Google Image searches, which now just cached all your images and sent you no traffic.  That hit here at TAGN somewhat, but over at my other blog, which is images only, traffic fell off a cliff and has never recovered.

A lot of internet interest went to social media around then as well.  Yes, Facebook and Twitter were things before then, but they really took over after 2012 or so.  Meanwhile, interest in MMORPGs fell off.

There was a bit of a Covid resurgence in 2020.  Blogs and MMORPGs were briefly popular again.  But that fell off pretty hard once the Covid vaccine let us do other things.

Then suddenly, things began to pick up again?  Why was that?

I have a version of that chart where I have included 2026 so far, with more than a quarter of the year to go, because the trend is rising.

TAGN Page View Traffic by Full Years – 2007 through Q3 2026

The blog is on track to get back into 2013 era numbers, which is crazy talk.  Few of the things I write about are very popular.  EVE Online is like death for blog views these days.  I’ll get into what is popular in a later section, but if I wanted more page views I’d only write about Pokemon Go, Stardew Valley, and No Man’s Sky.

And yes, I have written some about all three of those since 2022, but something else has been going on.  Looking over at Google Analytics for the blog, here are the top 20 cities that have sent me traffic in 2026.

  1. Singapore
  2. Matsumoto
  3. Bortala, Mongol Autonomous Prefecture
  4. Urumqi
  5. Kashgar Prefecture
  6. Ho Chi Minh City
  7. Dhaka
  8. Tashkent
  9. Tome
  10. Hanoi
  11. Ashburn, Virginia
  12. Sao Paulo
  13. Tunis
  14. Karachi
  15. North Bergen, New Jersey
  16. Lahore
  17. Amman
  18. Shenzhen
  19. Guangzhou
  20. London

What is the pattern there?  It sure isn’t “places with English speaking gamers.”   Yes, Singapore has a lot of English speakers.  And so does London, though if I broke these out by percentages you would see a pretty big gap between 15th and 16th spots for traffic.  So it is unlikely to be actual people coming here to read up on Stardew Valley.

Could it be places with AI data centers?

There is something interesting going on with the page view stats.  WordPress.com showed a huge spike in February and seems to have spotted some sort of bot trend and filtered it out.  It looks like they did another round of that in late August as traffic fell off something of a cliff in the last week and remains at 2022 levels.

Those levels are most likely correct and are largely driven by Google search results, which send me 300 to 1,200 page views a day depending on what I write about.  Google Search Console mostly agrees with those numbers.  With that trend in mind, I am on track for maybe 450K page views in 2026.

Google Analytics though… they have not done any filtering and are reporting at least double the activity that WordPress.com is this month, putting me on track for 600K or more views for 2026.

All of which is just another reminder that web stats are all garbage.  And you can’t even depend on consistency of measurement to spot trends because they keep changing up the models.

Who Sends Traffic to TAGN?

Search engines in general, and Google in particular.  WP.com has recorded 2,479,284 search engine referrals over the life of the blog and this is how they break down.

Search Engine  Referrals  % of total search Google Search           2,105,259 84.914% Google Image Search              237,926 9.597% Google Android Search Box                67,614 2.727% Bing                29,608 1.194% duckduckgo.com                11,273 0.455% Yahoo Search                   9,009 0.363% Yandex                   3,821 0.154% Ask.com                   1,881 0.076%  Google Mobile                   1,796 0.072% Baidu                   1,748 0.071% Yahoo Image Search                   1,472 0.059%  isearch.avg.com                   1,320 0.053% Ecosia                   1,203 0.049% wow.com                   1,118 0.045% search.babylon.com                      994 0.040% Conduit.com Search                      733 0.030% AOL                      712 0.029% search.comcast.net                      547 0.022% search-results.com                      472 0.019% Startpage                      425 0.017%  Brave Search                      353 0.014%

The thing is, WP.com also says that the blog has had a total of 7,413,746 page views since its inception, while the search engine views are only 2,479,284, or roughly 33% of total page views.

Part of that is because page views and referrals are different things.  If you get a referral from Google and you open up a dozen posts to see the comments, that is just one referral but a dozen page views.

And people occasionally do that.  I had that Canadian visitor back in 2020 who showed up in the middle of the night and scrolled the whole blog, logging a lot of page views.  But mostly people just show up, look at one post for less than a minute, then move on.

So it FEELS like somebody else must be sending me traffic.  But it probably isn’t from referrals.

Excluding search engines, here are the top 20 sites for referral traffic over the life of the blog.

Rank Site  Referrals Sent  1 virginworlds.com*        51,973 2 blessingofkings.blogspot.com (i)        51,702 3 WordPress.com Reader        47,256 4 totaleve.com*        43,472 5 evebloggers.com*        32,260 6 lowseclifestyle.com (i)        29,389 7 evenews24.com (i)        28,170 8 Google Reader*        25,899 9 Twitter*        21,856 10 keenandgraev.com (i)        18,935 11 Facebook        17,304 12 Reddit        17,209 13 bhagpuss.blogspot.com        12,230 14 syncaine.com (i)        11,462 15 playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com (i)        10,958 16 popehat.com (i)        10,858 17 feedly.com        10,254 18 greedygoblin.blogspot.com (i)        10,154 19 eq2-daily.com*           7,948 20 killtenrats.com           6,803

Sites marked with an asterisk are no longer there.  Sites marked with “(i)” are still there, but inactive.  Technically Twitter is still there as X.com, but it actively suppresses links to outside sites now, so is effectively no longer a traffic source, in addition to being dead to me.

I am going to give Ethic the benefit of the doubt since he seems to be back for Guild Wars 3 over at Kill Ten Rats.  But there was also a semi-farewell post a couple years back and a whole lot of quiet since Zubon moved on.  (Was that really in 2019? Yikes!)

Also, sites at blogspot.com are annoying because Google gives you the domain for every country, so I would have to dig out Blessing of Kings for co.uk and .au and .ca and whatever else generated traffic, which would likely put it above Virgin Worlds, but I don’t have the energy for the effort.  A general review indicates that you should maybe add between 5% to 20% to their counts, but no more than that.

The top 20 there only add up to about 466K referrals, which pegs them at about 20% of search engine traffic and maybe 6% of page views.

Which means some large percentage of traffic is likely bots.  But we knew that already, didn’t we?  It is either that or my burgeoning fan base in Bortala, Mongol Autonomous Prefecture.

One source of traffic that has absolutely not developed is the LLMs the bots are scraping sites to feed.  You can find a few entries for each way, way, way down the referral list, but the next one to make it to three digits on the list will be the first.  The only LLM element that sends traffic on any regular basis is Tipa’s Daily Blog Roll, and that is managing one or two a day.  The LLM companies do not want to join the internet, they want to eat the internet whole and sell it back to you via tokens.

What is Popular Here in Any Case?

This is always more interesting to me than raw stats, and I will open with the usual list of the top 20 most popular posts over the lifetime of the blog, now with both the view count and the month/year when each item was published.

  1. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID! – Jul 2009 – 66,698 views
  2. Play On: Guild Name Generator – Aug 2007 – 66,233 Views
  3. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit – Oct 2011- 57,213 Views
  4. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online – Aug 2007 – 40,281 Views
  5. How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark – Mar 2011 – 36,290 Views
  6. First Pokemon Black and White Download Event – Victini – Mar 2011 – 33,347 Views
  7. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean – Jul 2018 – 31,190 Views
  8. From Alola Pokedex to National Pokedex in Pokemon Sun – Mar 2017 – 26,149 Views
  9. April Fools at Blizzard – 2013 – Apr 2013 – 24,799 Views
  10. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk! – Jul 2011 – 24,661Views
  11. Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access – Feb 2008 – 23,892 Views
  12. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II – Jan 2013 – 23,141 Views
  13. Timing Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go – May 2023 – 23,028 Views
  14. Diablo III vs. Torchlight II – A Matter of Details – May 2012 -22,362 Views
  15. EVE Online – The Tutorial – Sep 2006 – 18,737 Views
  16. The Mighty Insta-90 Question – Which Class to Boost? – Jan 2014 – 18,730 Views
  17. The No Man’s Sky Holidays 2025 Expedition Schedule – Nov 2025 – 17,709 Views
  18. Type 59 Being Pulled from the World of Tanks Store – Jan 2012 – 16,023 Views
  19. World of Warcraft Magazine – Issue 2 – Jul 2010 – 15,990 Views
  20. Level 85 in EverQuest… Now What? – Mar 2014 – 15,953 Views

As I have said in the past, there is a lot of old stuff on that list that have been carried on through time.  And a good quarter of them are barely even things I wrote.  They are rather things I copied or put up based on news.

For example, the most recently posted item on that list is about the 2025 No Man’s Sky holiday expedition schedule.  Nice to have something less than a year old make the cut, but that was me summarizing a post by Hello Games and adding some context and links.

Now you can compare this with the top 20 most viewed posts over the last three years.

  1. The No Man’s Sky Holidays 2025 Expedition Schedule Nov 2025 – 17,728 Views
  2. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends Aug 2024 – 15,648 Views
  3. Timing those Lucky Egg Milestones in Pokemon Go May 2023 – 14,984 Views
  4. The No Man’s Sky Worlds Part II Update Overwhelms Me Feb 2025 – 14,516 Views
  5. WoW Classic 2025 Road Map includes Pandaria and Vanilla Servers Nov 2024 – 10,520 Views
  6. Planning my Platinum Medal Strategy for Pokemon Go Level 49 Aug 2025 – 10,140 Views
  7. Cat Catching in Enshrouded – Nov 2024 – 9,675 Views
  8. No Man’s Sky and Finishing Up Expedition 21: Remnant and Beyond Feb 2026 – 8,923 Views
  9. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID! Jul 2009 – 8,839 Views
  10. Stuck on the Level 47 Requirements for Pokemon Go Dec 2024 – 8,624 Views
  11. Level 45 at Last in Pokemon Go May 2024 – 8,260 Views
  12. Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky Sep 2025 – 7,874 Views
  13. Answering Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft Apr 2023 – 7,353 Views
  14. No Man’s Sky Remnant, the Furnace, and the Final Colossus UpgradesFeb 20266230Views
  15. April Fools at Blizzard 2026 – Am I Still Doing This? Apr 2026 – 6,192 Views
  16. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor Apr 2020 – 5,855 Views
  17. This One Simple Trick will Up Your Pokemon Go Steps Dramatically! Mar 2025 – 5,702 Views
  18. Threads is Dead Jan 2025 – 5,648 Views
  19. Stardew Valley – The Luau, The Train, and the Green Rain Jun 2026 – 5,261 Views
  20. WoW Midnight Editions and Pricing for Early Access for Housing Aug 2025 – 4,825 Views

There are some overlaps.  Alamo will never die.  That post gets linked on the WoW Classic subreddit every six months or so.  But when the weight of years has been removed you do see some more recent items.  Even items from this year.

Then, if we want a more recent perspective, these are the top 20 most viewed posts over the past three month.

  1. Stardew Valley – The Luau, The Train, and the Green Rain Jun 2026 – 5,261Views
  2. Stardew Valley – Stardrops as the Second Winter Approaches Aug 2026 – 4,054 Views
  3. No Man’s Sky Expedition 22: Why Would I Run These Missions? Jun 2026 – 3,704 Views
  4. Windrose: Welcome to the Swamp Jul 2026 – 3,147 Views
  5. Planning my Platinum Medals for Pokemon Go Level 49 Aug 2025 – 2,403 Views
  6. A Brief Survey of MMORPG Subscription Prices in 2026 Jun 2026 – 2,294 Views
  7. Planning My 50 Platinum Medals for Level 80 in Pokemon Go Jul 2026 – 2,065 Views
  8. No Man’s Sky and The Swarm Expedition: Countdown to the end of the Countermeasures Milestone Jul 2026 – 1,791 Views
  9. No Man’s Sky and Getting Started with Expedition 22: The Swarm Jun 2026 – 1,753 Views
  10. Stardew Valley on Our TV Jun 2026 – 1.712 Views
  11. This One Simple Trick will Up Your Pokemon Go Steps Dramatically! Mar 2025 – 1,556 Views
  12. Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky Sep 2025 – 1,232 Views
  13. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends Aug 2024 – 1,059 Views
  14. EVE Online, Departure Planning, and the Big Sell Off Aug 2026 – 927 Views
  15. Cat Catching in Enshrouded Nov 2024 – 897 Views
  16. EverQuest Legends Announced… But What is it Exactly? Mar 2026 – 792 Views
  17. Making Level 73 in Pokemon Go and onward to Level 74 Jan 2026 – 748 Views
  18. Stardew Valley and Through the Winter and Into Year Two Jul 2026 – 737 Views
  19. Microsoft Embraces Layoffs and Enshittification for XBox Games Jun 2026 – 724 Views
  20. Stardew Valley and Creating a New Save Jul 2026 – 710 Views

As I have said elsewhere, Stardew Valley has been more popular than I expected.  Then again, it has sold some 50 million copies, putting it in contention with Overwatch for popularity. That’s enough that I am surprised Microsoft hasn’t tried to buy it and screw it up.  I think there could be a world where you ren