A Sunnier Bear One Year Anniversary

On March 2, 2011, I posted my first blog post. I originally started this blog because I could never find any tank-centric encounter guides. It seemed like every guide I could find on the web was written by a healer and couldn't tell me where to stand or when to taunt. So I decided to take it upon myself and write some tank-specific guides myself, starting with my very first post, Bear vs. Heroic Magmaw.

A Sunnier Bear was my third attempt at blogging. The very first, Hullo Bear, was mostly an experimental visual documentation of Sunnier's leveling through Cataclysm.

I actually started that blog years ago, the intent being that I would have a platform for taking about bear tank things, but it never really took off. As you might have noticed, Hullo Bear's banner was my inspiration for A Sunnier Bear's. I still love the name of that blog, but I created a new one so that I could build it around my new persona (i.e. Sunnier).

The second attempt was my Tumblr. My screenshot documentation from Hullo Bear encouraged me to try out some other blogging tools.

At this point all I wanted was an avenue for visual blogging, and Tumblr filled that niche quite nicely. However, soon the itch to write (and the aforementioned lack of tanking guides) convinced me to create what is now A Sunnier Bear.

In the future, I'd like to move this blog to a more general level and branch out to other games, and eventually to build upon my passion for user experience design in gaming. My more immediately goals are to get a custom domain name, post a bear tanking guide on YouTube, and write something up about my UI.

And because I have an odd fascination with blogging statistics, here are some that I think are interesting.


Most Popular Posts of All Time

1. How to Make Your Weapon Awesome in 4.3 (10,000 pageviews)
2. Heroic Yor'sahj 10 Tanking Guide (6,500 pageviews)
3. Heroic Ultraxion 10 Tanking Guide (5,900 pageviews)

Most Popular Traffic Sources

1. Google (32,500 hits)
2. Wow Insider (10,200 hits)
3. The Inconspicuous Bear (1,229 hits)

Most Popular Search Terms

1. bearcat
2. sunnier bear
3. druid transmogrification

My Personal Favorite Posts

1. How Do You Explain WoW to non-WoW players?
2. How to Make Tanking More Interactive (from long before we knew active mitigation was in MoP)
3. Why Lady Pandaren Should Be Fat and Sassy

My Favorite Posts that Never Got Much Attention

1. Thoughts from My Free-to-Play Days
2. The Tragedy of Atramedes
3. How Active Mitigation Might Work for Bears
4. Worgenlings

My Favorite Drawings

1. The Rage Fairy, from  How Active Mitigation Might Work for Bears.

2. This Bear Has No Rage, from Bear Feedback.

3. Mangle All The Things, from  Bear Feedback.

Number of Published Posts
70

Number of Unpublished Posts
30

Number of Comments
182

Number of Spam Comments
1 (I'm actually pretty surprised by this)

Number of Subscribers According to Google Reader
127

Number of Followers According to Blogger
6

Posts per Week
1.35

All Time Blog Views

148,000

Browsers of Visitors

Operating Systems of Visitors

Countries of Visitors

How Much A Sunnier Bear Has Grown in One Year

Traffic Chart
(I wish the chart started at the same time as my blog instead of some random date, but I can't fix it.)

Approximate Pageviews in March 2011

2,000

Approximate Pageviews in February 2012

33,000

What Sunnier Looked like in March 2011

What Sunnier Looked like in February 2012

Side Link Statistics

Number of Twitter Followers

286

Number of Tweets

2,226

Number of YouTube Channel Views

25,000

Number of YouTube Subscribers

39

Number of Emails to my Blog Address

32