It’s that time of year again, i.e. the end! Time to look back, because soon we’ll be looking forward! As ever, it’s fun to look back to the start of the year and see whether any of my targets where met!? 🙂

My main target for 2012 was to achieve an average of 4-5 posts a month, small by the standards of many blogs I know, but hopefully sustainable! So did I achieve it? Well, I managed 4 or more posts in 9 of the 12 months, and no months without any posts, so that is at least positive. Also, by concentrating on producing posts in my ‘columns’, I feel that the subject and quality of the posts has been higher. Although I certainly didn’t achieve a post in each of my columns every month, there was a reasonable selection throughout the year:

Wizards Watch was my most productive column, with 11 posts during the year. The majority of posts were on the subject of DnDNext, which of course has one of the major topics in the D&D world this year. Truth to be told, I’m no longer really following along as closely as I was, as I’m concentrating on my 4E kids’ campaign: Wizards Watch: An Admission.

My DM for Kids column started off with a bang with a couple of posts I was really pleased with: The Menagerie, and Session Props, but faded out a little later in the year, mainly due to the fact that we weren’t playing!! Definitely something to improve for next year…

I guess the column I was most disappointed in was Content Corner, as it was probably the one I most wanted to get going regularly, but in the end I only managed 5 posts. The ‘Havenscoast Project’, a 4E Gazetteer of a region of Tolrendor, was intended to be the main subject, but I also published a fun ‘Buying Horses‘ skill challenge, a short delve ‘Rats Below‘ and some nasty Fey Spiders! I certainly found that trying to rush design and publication of worthwhile content is hard!! If I’m going to do better next year, more forward planning is required!

My fantasy cartography column Map of the Month tends to be the most popular on the site in terms of visitors. I had a mix of posts, some showing off my own work, such as this map of the Havenscoast region, as well as highlighting some of the great mapping sites on the internet e.g. here, and here … and many others!

RPG Tech Talk was a lot of fun. I ended up posting 8 times during the year, and covered a varied range of topics: PDF encryption, the iBooks format for RPGs, the Tech Gametable, and campaign note-taking using Microsoft OneNote.

On other subjects, I participated in a couple of RPG Blog Carnivals, always good for getting a few more links into the site. I like these, as the subjects are often a bit outside the area of my typical post, so add some variety!

Having participated in a number of Kickstarter/Patronage projects with Open Design for the last couple of years, the highlight release this year was the Midgard Campaign Setting. Having really enjoyed this product, I decided to do a multi-part review, which is still ongoing (so far, here, here and here…) – it’s a big book after all! This series has generated a large amount of traffic to the blog, co-inciding with my best ever day in terms of hits.

In terms of traffic, 2012 has seen considerable growth – more than twice as many views as  2011, with four of my best ever months coming in the last six – the best ever being this month! In absolute terms, still pretty tiny, but definitely the right trajectory, and given my limited posting targets, I think all I can expect! 🙂

So overall, TolrendorDM’s Blog has had a good 2012, in my opionion 🙂

See you next year for more gaming content, comment and fun!!

Onwards!! (as Wolfgang would say…!)