So I missed it by about a week, but April 12th, 2011 was the date of the first post ever posted on Phat Lewts' Gold Blog, making this past April 12th 3 years since my first post!
Taking a Look Back
So let's look back to that original post, the one that got things started. As you know I'm generally not one for fanfare, so there was no "introduction post" to Phat Lewts' Gold Blog, just a post titled Accountant. Receiving a whopping 87 views to this very date, my first post was a bit of a dud. You can check it out, I edited the text formatting a bit. The original text was black and impossible to read on my current background, but I preserved the wonky layout and text of the original. You may also notice I was posting under the name Dwhittman, which at the time the name of my main character (an Orc Warlock).
Shortly after that first post I wrote my second post TradeSkillMaster - Posting & Canceling. Looking at the screenshots in that post, I can safely say that both TSM and my Blog have come a long way since! In contrast to the 87, that post saw over 2,000 views by today, more of a testament to TSM than my own writing ability. By May of 2011 I wrote my 5th post, and fell off the map for almost 6 months thereafter. Probably lost in the nether as one of the defunct gold blogs that started out as a great idea, but fell into obscurity. I came back in November of that year, and I've written at least 2-3 posts in every month since (and usually many many more).
If you want to check out some of my older posts, you can find my entire Blog Archive in my left sidebar. One last thing in the reminiscing department! I did not have all of these saved, but I went to archive.org and grabbed various screenshots of the different layouts of my blog over the years. I also added when I created the logo I used for a majority of the three year run.
Statistics
Of course as a numbers man I have to give you some statistics at this point. My post with the most views of all time is Your Guide to Spirit of Harmony receiving 28,383 views. It came out near the beginning of MoP and was obviously a hot issue at the time as people got used to their new trade skill item. My highest number of site referrals come from google with nearly 100,000 (~10%) of my pageviews coming from them.
One of the coolest things about writing this blog though is being able to reach readers across the world. Here's a list of the top 10 countries that read my blog:
Country
Pageviews
United States
512147
United Kingdom
72134
Canada
49318
Germany
43185
Australia
36996
Sweden
30702
Denmark
13801
Netherlands
12151
China
10131
Ukraine
5285
Pretty damn cool!
Thank You
Last but definitely not least, I want to thank you all, the readers of my blog for supporting me through these years. I'm quickly nearing 1,000,000 pageviews (also in the left sidebar), and without an audience I'd be writing to myself and this blog wouldn't exist. Through these years I've really enjoyed taking part in and interacting with the gold making community in WoW. It's amazing what happens when people come together from different walks of life and all around the world to combine and discuss their different approaches to gold making. I've really enjoyed being a part of the communities over at The Consortium, on the TSM IRC, as well as on reddit, and everyone who has taken the time to comment on my blog posts or Youtube videos. It's been a fun ride, but look for much more to come as we move forward to WoD!
Cheers,
Phat Lewts
@PhatLewtsGold
PhatLewtsGold