This entry is part 6 in the series The Best

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It gets harder and harder to cull these lists down to something reasonable. This problem is exacerbated this time around because there were a lot of standalone articles in this period, and not many series.

Which actually placed me on the horns of a dilemma that I had managed to avoid even noticing previously – standards vs a relatively flat population. If I were to include everything that was of a similar standard to the items selected in the past, 2014 would be way too large to be completed in a single article, I would need to split it (and, probably, subsequent years) into two parts. On the other hand, if I were to cull to the same total – trying for 20-25 links, maximum, from the year – an awful lot of good, useful, content would be cut.

I started preparing to go either way, planning to make the decision after I saw the actual magnitude of what would be affected. But by the time I got April done, it was fairly obvious – gone would be the article about generating adventures from everyday assumptions, and the ergonomics of non-humans, and how to use Dreams, and how to construct and implement a unique answer to the question “What Is Magic” – in fact, entirely too much would be lost. So my choice is Option A, and that’s why this article is “Pt 1: January to June”.

2014 was another good year for Campaign Mastery on a great many fronts. Readership stabilized at a nice, steady, reliable number, 1500+ every week. This was 20% down on the 2013 numbers, but those had declined mostly because Johnn was no longer promoting Campaign Mastery in Roleplaying Tips, which made a difference of about 25%.

Over the course of this 6 months, over 25K unique visitors made almost 40K visits to the site, viewing 66K pages in the process. Reader loyalty remained at a magnificent 40%, four times the typical rate. That took the grand combined total to 307K visitors*, 483K visits, and 863K page views – figures that I never expected when we started the Blog!

Part of the reason was that I was really starting to hit my stride as a writer. I turned out a lot of articles that I am very proud of (and still refer to regularly, as do many others to judge from the readership analytics) in the course of 2014. And so, to this listing of the best of them…

* FYI, in the coming week, the number of unique visitors to Campaign Mastery will tick over the 400K mark!

The Best Of 2014 Pt 1: January-June

By my count, 23 of the best. The road into the archives in search of platinum, gold, and silver starts here! As always, this list is very subjective, and you may not agree with my choices.

Scoring 10/10:

The best of the best of 2014 (part 1).

Scoring 9/10:

There’s a whole host of reasons why this article or that falls short of the standard set by those listed above. It could be useful to only a subgroup of the readership, or it might give advice that’s good in theory but takes a little bit of work in practice, or contain ideas or techniques that were tricky to explain clearly. Or maybe it just didn’t ‘grab’ me quite as much when I re-read it! In most of these, I don’t think that I could improve them with my current standard of skill.

Scoring 8/10:

There’s an equally-great variety of reasons for these to score just a touch lower than those listed previously – whether that be practicality, or relevance, or whatever. They are all good articles, just not as universally useful as the ones above. In many cases, the principles or techniques are fine but the explanations don’t seem quite good enough, or there are minor tweaks that could be applied to improve the article; where that’s not the case, they just aren’t quite beneficial or relevant enough to the majority of readers.

Honorable Mentions: Scoring 7/10:

These are all good advice or interesting discussions, but not quite good enough to make the cut (I’ll explain why in most specific cases as I go):

Part 2 of this list may be some time away, or it may be quite close. I have a number of lengthy/intensive-effort-required articles scheduled for the next couple of months; I’ve tried to schedule these on a fortnightly basis, to keep the schedule viable. This was supposed to be one of them (The Google Image Search article was another), but then I made the decision (explained earlier) to cut the workload in half – so the other half is short enough to drop into the schedule in place of an article that won’t be done in time, but too long to work as a substitute for a shorter article. We’ll just have to see how things go…



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