When the Blogdex was first published, it was brilliant. It made it easy to find the exact article I wanted to refer to, enabling rich cross-linking that would lead the reader to other relevant content and began creating a broader overview from the individual articles. I’m sure that it performed a similar service for those readers who found it on the site.

When the Blogdex was first published, it was a nightmare. It was so large a document (38,475 words if you don’t count all the HTML formatting; 62,352 if you do – 107 pages of content) that it broke all sorts of systems and subsystems – everything from the RSS Feed on down.

As time went by, it became less useful and less frequently consulted as the content that wasn’t indexed grew as a percentage of the total.

At around the time of the 750th post, it became almost obsolete; the articles I was cross-linking to weren’t on the index, they were too recent. I thought seriously about updating it – which was (long-time readers may recall) the original plan – but was daunted by the structural complexity and the sheer amount of work involved, and circumstances that would not accommodate either of those considerations.

I wasn’t about to let that get in the way this time around. I’ve been planning for this for about a year, now. I had other ideas as well – but they were let go when the planning and organizational requirements threatened to make the Blogdex untenable. For example, a roll-call of podcasts and webcasts, with their advice to GMs, similar to the one I did for bloggers in A Campaign Mastery 750th-post Celebration. Well, that will have to wait for the 1250th post, due around the end of October, 2023. After all, I’m not just celebrating the 10th Anniversary milestone, significant as that is – I’m also celebrating the 1000th post here at Campaign Mastery that has meaningful content! Again, the most appropriate way to do it that I can think of is by updating the Blogdex, and in the process, celebrating those past 1000 posts!

The Usual Review – extended

It’s traditional, when these milestones come around, to provide some site insights. So, in it’s ten years, Campaign Mastery has seen 1,371,092 page views by 546,475 visitors who have been to the site 809,475 times. There have been 1009 posts (including this one), producing 5517 approved comments, 295,218 spam (and counting). The average visit lasts almost 1.75 minutes and the average visitor has been to the site almost 1.5 times.

When you factor in the number of visitors who drop in, realize “this is not the site I’m looking for” and exit almost immediately, those numbers are huge. 74.42% of visitors fall into that category, accounting for 406,687 visitors, visits, and page views. That means that the remaining 139,788 actual readers have provided 964,405 page views over 402,788 visits, the numbers shoot way up – 2.9 visits to the average reader, and 2.4 articles (pageviews) read per visit.

And those are articles of substance – the average is currently estimated to be around 4,200 words (down from 4,450), so 1008 articles is 4,233,600 words.

If you figure that the average visit time of those who depart right away is 10 seconds, which seems reasonable, the average visit length for the rest works out to 6 min 21.4 seconds. Or, to put it another way, 78,970,762 seconds have been spent by visitors actually reading the content. That’s 914 days, 19 min, and 22 seconds, if they did it consecutively with no gaps, 24/7. A smidgen over 2.5 years. If it only happened 8 hours a day, that’s 7.5 years. If it was 8 hours a day, five days a week, that’s 10.5 years – about 6 months longer than the site has even existed!

Another “measure of success” is that our security systems stop about 6,500 attempts to hack the site every month, totaling more than 350,000 over the life of the site. I don’t know if that’s higher or lower than others, and I’m not sure that I want to know!

Comparisons

It’s worth comparing the numbers above with those from the 750th post. Since then, there have been: approx 350,000 page views and approx 220,000 visits.

A more recent snapshot was included in Beginnings And Legacies, the New Years post at the start of 2018. Since it was published, we’ve had 43,982 visitors, visiting 58,059 times, and viewing 80,464 pages. That’s over roughly 11 months of the current year.

These are all numbers to be proud of, and I am. There are literally hundreds of visitors who have come to Campaign Mastery more than 500 times. There are tens of thousands who have been more than 100 times, and about 100,000 who only pop in occasionally but who have been back more than once.

But, looking over the last few years of the history of the site, one thing is clear:

The Ennies Cast A Long Shadow

You can get a better idea of how Campaign Mastery is, and has been, traveling if you look at the graphic below.

The first thing you notice is the big clump of high numbers on the left-hand side. The red line is the average traffic to the site (number of visits) before the Ennie nomination, at which time the growth rate was about 4% per annum; the Green line is what they immediately went up to (on average) when Campaign Mastery won Silver. For almost two years, this 50%+ boost to readers continued, and then – as abruptly as it came – it stopped.

A little further to the right, you can see the effect of merely being nominated. I still get a few visitors every day from the list of nominees.

The second thing that there is to notice is that with the exception of those months on the left called out for Ennie-related boosts, the average each month has been fairly consistent. Sure, some months have been low – October 2017, and October-November 2018 – but there have also been a number at the average or better, and the Ennie-nomination months were way better. And even during the Ennies-win boost, November and the months to either side of it were noticeably lower in visitors. It’s just something that seems to happen every year.

The red line was just below 10,000 a month; the blue line is just below 12,000. And, when you track the weekly values, and do the math, growth is still about 4-5% per annum. Campaign Mastery, from the standpoint of readers, is doing just fine.

The Immediate Future

So Campaign Mastery is ten years old – how do I plan to celebrate? And how am I going to get around the problems with the Blogdex?

I have feature articles planned for December 10th, 17th, 24th, and 31st. There may be other surprise pop-up articles as well – I neither confirm nor deny.

But the Big Birthday Project is going to be the Blogdex.

• You may have noticed that “The Best” has been replaced by “Blogdex” in the menu at the top of the page. “The Best” is now considered a special subcategory within the Blogdex. (Actually, I bet most of you haven’t. The menu is like the furniture, never noticed unless it collapses.)
• Starting 2 days from now, and continuing daily, I will be adding a page to the Blogdex every day. Each page contains a master category (and there has been a little reorganizing since the original Blogdex).
• At the same time, I will be posting these pages contents here at Campaign Mastery as posts.
• That means that the last one will go up on December 23, if all goes according to plan. But I’ve got the rest of December as margin for error. And most of January, if I need it – though I would rather spend that time preparing my campaigns for 2019 play.
• These posts and pages will initially be seeded with the content from the first Blogdex. They will be updated daily with new material until the Blogdex is up to date. I calculate that I’ll have to do 2.4 months worth per day to finish at the end of the month. I’ll try to do 3 to build up a cushion and let me take a few days off over the holidays.
• Because I’ve slowed the publishing rate of late, there will be an acceleration towards the end – right when the overheads of having to update many pages will really be starting to bite. This is not a coincidence.

You read that right – for most of the month of December, there will be daily updates to Campaign Mastery, or near-daily.

Resetting The Official Post Number

I’ve written before about the problems in counting posts, here at Campaign Mastery, most recently in the introduction to “If Wishing Made It So“, which was – technically – the 1000th post. The problem is that there are a number of posts that I don’t think count toward the site’s mission, which I analyzed in great detail in the original Blogdex, and which I will recapitulate a little later in this post.

An announcement of “No post today” should not count (that’s happened just 2 or 3 times in 10 years). If the site limits (as they were at the time) force an article to be broken up into several posts – it happened – and those were published virtually simultaneously, it should count as one and not three (or whatever). Extraordinary announcements – be they about service difficulties or Ennie nominations – shouldn’t count. And so on.

All told, there are 10 or 12 posts that shouldn’t count by a reasonable definition of function. And perhaps another 4 to 6 that shouldn’t count by stricter definitions, and another half-dozen or so that maybe shouldn’t count under the strictest and most pedantic of definitions.

So, if this is officially post 1009 – which it is, according to the system software – then the corrected number is 999. Or 997. Or 993. Or 991. Or maybe just 979. And the real 1,000th post could happen next week, or at the end of the month, or in January, or February, or March, if I publish at the rate of 1 a week.

With the four feature articles planned, the “technical” count will go up to 1013. With 16 additional Blogdex posts, it will hit 1029 by the end of the year. So, here’s the plan: The final post of 2018 will be officially designated the 1000th. Any shortfall that a strict count would produce will be more than compensated for by the multiple Blogdex posts. And whether they count as one or as sixteen – who cares?

A restatement of purpose

As part of the original Blogdex, I analyzed the mission statement of Campaign Mastery – it’s at the top of every page, right under the blog title. I thought it appropriate to recapitulate and update that section of the original for this post.

Expert advice on creating and running exceptional campaigns

That mission statement contains four key pieces.

Expert Advice

I’ve been active in this hobby for approaching forty years, and I’ve seen and done a lot in that time. This magazine/blog (‘magablog?’) exists to pass on what I’ve learned, and any new thoughts, discoveries, and insights that present themselves as I continue to game and grow. There are so many posts tagged “DM Advice” that it no longer shows up in the tag cloud – 595 of them.

Creating

There’s an emphasis on creation and creativity. One of the most frequently-used categories here is ‘The End of The Rainbow’, which is the term I coined to symbolize inspiration and sources of inspiration. Any post so tagged is one that contains plot ideas that you might be able to adapt to your own adventures and campaigns, if not incorporate outright. As of this writing, 335 posts have been tagged that way.

Running

It’s not enough to make something great, you have to be able to use it, and use it well. Otherwise, what’s the point? So the second major strand of discussion is using whatever you’ve got, and how to do it as effectively as possible, or providing tools for readers to use. There are more than 160 posts devoted to writing, more than 200 dedicated to tools & techniques, and more than 150 to running encounters (note that some of these overlap!) – enough that practicality is a third key strand of content.

Exceptional

Well, at least, I hope so. I strive for a depth of article that few blogs can match. Others might be more profound, or more insightful, or more easily-read; my goal is to write articles that are both comprehensive and evergreen. While I will often tag posts with a particular game system, such as D&D, that usually means that the content can be specifically applied to campaigns using those game mechanics – not that it is or should be considered restricted to those game systems. Very few articles at Campaign Mastery could not be tagged “Universal”.

The other aspect of uniqueness that helps make Campaign Mastery stand out is my style, which is as close as I can get to my conversational style. That’s one of the tricks that I use to achieve my ability to write quickly, and it’s something that I learned from the non-fiction of Isaac Asimov. It means that I employ more words than are strictly necessary, but those words flow out far more quickly than they would if I strived for a more succinct mode of expression. It’s my ongoing hope that it also makes the articles easier to read as well.

The Mission

So that’s what I aim for with Campaign Mastery. But that all comes at a price. The more content there is in an article, and the depth I strive for generates a lot of content, the more inadequate the introductory paragraph/section becomes as a synopsis of the whole.

On top of that, I’m not afraid to digress if it seems interesting enough, relevant enough, useful enough, or important enough. Several times, people have told me that they later discovered that they had given up reading an article too soon, because there didn’t seem to be anything of value to them within it – and in the process, missed a tip that would have greatly benefited their games. Others, who skim articles, often report shooting straight past the meat of the article. I do my best to call these asides out in a very visible way, but sometimes it’s simply not enough.

The real price to be paid is time. It takes me a lot of time to write an article for Campaign Mastery – sometimes more than I really have. It takes a lot of time for people to read those articles. I recognize that doing so is an investment of a very precious commodity, a GM’s time, and so I try hard to reward that investment.

These considerations have all played into my thinking about Campaign Mastery beyond the tenth anniversary.

The future of Campaign Mastery

I abandon a lot of ideas and half-finished articles because it becomes clear that they simply won’t fit Campaign Mastery’s publishing timetable. Over the last year, I’ve been experimenting with different ways to lift those constraints. Some have worked, others have been partial successes, one or two have achieved only abject failure.

The Campaign Mastery Guarantee

With the possible exception of outside forces beyond my control, I will commit to publishing a new and complete article once a week, just as I have been.

Beyond That Promise

The rest of the time I have available for Campaign Mastery will be spent working on one or more articles that have fallen into the “too much time” trap. When these are complete, one of two things will happen – they will either be inserted into the regular publishing sequence, pushing back the article next scheduled to appear (or maybe the one after that), or they will be held aside for publishing in a low- to mid-priced e-book (depending on the content and page-count). Once I’ve largely caught up (and heaven knows when that will be), I’ll start taking published articles here at Campaign Mastery and updating them for e-book publication, too. And, for the record, I consider US$2 or less to be low-priced and US$5-10 to be mid-priced). At last count, I had almost 70 of these half-complete projects underway.

And, from time to time, I might post something extra “mid-week”. But this will be an exception, not a rule.

In particular in e-book terms, I’m looking at the 24 remaining parts of the Diversity Of Seasons series. These take about a day per season per location, with 1 season for 7-8 locations contained in each post. If I could work on CM seven days a week, that would be barely manageable – but I can’t, so these take 2-3 weeks each to complete. The current plan is to post twelve-to-fourteen more of these here at Campaign Mastery – finishing Winter, and covering Spring, Summer, and Autumn for those locations whose Winters have already been featured – and to put the remaining 10-12 into a mid-priced e-book. When I get that far, the plan will be to alternate – one “post” for the e-book, one long-term post for Campaign Mastery.

But, before I get to that, there’s another epic post to complete. It’s so big that I might have to publish it as a free e-book or even an e-book bundle. Or I might split it into four or five or six parts (even though it really needs to be read more-or-less as one continuous document or you tend to get lost). It’s that big. To be honest, I haven’t figured out how to best manage it yet. But I’ve been working on it for more than a year, and want to see it done, so that’s my priority.

Changes To The Blogdex

I’m planning to incorporate a couple of changes into the Blogdex as I go.

• One or two of the categories have been slightly redefined – “Rules” has become “Rules & Mechanics” and now includes RPG Theory, for example.
• There will be a couple of new categories – “Places” and [Ongoing] “Campaigns”.
• Some of the campaigns will have new sub-categories – I’m going to add “Time Travel” to the Genre Overviews, for example. Some existing categories will be renamed – “Problems” will become “Problem Solving”, for example.

Other changes will occur as a result of the content – if something just doesn’t seem to fit the existing subcategories, that indicates the need for another subcategory. Growth will be organic, just as it was in the original.

How to use the Blogdex

At the top of each page of the Blogdex is a menu panel. You can get to any page of the Blogdex from any other page. Each button on the menu leads to one of the subcategories of the Blogdex. To use the Blogdex, simply decide which category is most likely to contain the article you want to find, and click on the button that goes with that category. The master page also lists the subcategories for the whole index structure to help you. Right now, the only links that are active are to and from The Best. That’s where those daily updates come in.

Once you get to a category page, you will find a definition/description of the category, a list of the subcategories, and the page content. Some subcategories are further divided so that related posts are grouped together. Decide the subcategory or subcategories that you want to check, and scroll down to it. I am investigating the possibility of using anchor tags, but these all have to be done manually, and I’ve never worked with them before.

When you get to the right subcategory, scroll through looking at titles and descriptions until you find what you are looking for. Posts are NOT necessarily listed in date sequence. Again, the purpose is to collate related posts into clusters. Each entry includes one or more paragraphs of description. Some series may have a single entry that links to each part of the series, or to the first part, or to the series index page.

Where items are relevant to several categories or subcategories, they will either be drawn out into a dedicated sub-category, or redundant entries made. Better to list a post two or three times than not be able to find it when you want it.

So, that’s the plan. I’ve spent the last two days intensively working on the graphics, layout and HTML that will bring it to fruition, and suspect that I have one more day of work on that front, and then it’s all about content….