My 2022 blogging stats proved to be fairly stable with 2021’s stats. All but one of last year’s Top 10 posts are still among this year’s Top 10, though not all in the same position. Only one dropped out (albeit only to #11), and a post from 2018 joined the year’s Top 10 for the very first time. Many of my most-viewed posts have stayed consistent from year to year, but they tend to shift position slightly. My posts in my “A Primer on ______________ Names” series (which I’m long overdue to resume!) have been getting quite a lot of traction, to the point that, exactly as last year, they now occupy fully half of the Top 10 slots. They also claim five more slots in the Top 20 (down from six last year), and five additional slots in the Top 30.
This year’s Top 5 posts were:
“Favorite Decameron stories, Part I,” published 28 December 2011, at 1,662 views in 2022 and 11,264 total. This is my third-most-viewed post of all time. If you follow my YouTube channel, I plan to begin a series on The Decameron once I start getting an average of 5–10 comments per video. I want to know I’m not wasting my time and energy on this endeavour.
“A primer on Russian names,” published 28 December 2012, at 1,458 views in 2022 and 15,372 total. This is still my next-most-viewed most ever. Were I writing it today, it would have so many more names. A lot of my posts in this series could benefit from expansion, which is why I’ll put them all together in a book when I finally post the last installment (whenever that may be).
“A primer on Occitan names,” published 28 December 2016, at 771 views in 2022 and 4,862 total. This has become my fifth-most-viewed post.
“Writing an arm amputee character,” published 27 October 2014, at 762 views in 2022 and 6,720 total. This is my fourth-most-viewed post ever, though a lot of people who find it are pervy fetishists looking for amputee porn, not sensitive, accurate information on amputation. These dudes are so pornsick they don’t bother looking at the preview text, just click right on that link. I’d love to see the looks on their creepy faces when they realise this isn’t a porn site!
“Why I HATED The Book Thief,” published 5 August 2013, at 745 views in 2022 and 4,578 total. This is my sixth-most-viewed post of all time, and I still stand by every word ripping this insanely overrated garbage a new one.
***NEWSFLASH!***
It still sucks, bites, and blows! Like so many other popular books about the Shoah, it’s emotionally manipulative bestseller bait and Holocaust-lite for the masses, NOT quality, well-researched, historically-accurate literature for the ages.
Rounding out the Top 10 were:
“Writing about Victorian postmortem photos,” at its second year on the Top 10, published 11 November 2020, at 722 views in 2022 and 1,561 total. This has risen to my 16th-most-viewed post, up from #22 overall last year. Judging by some of my other popular posts, it may eventually jump into the overall Top 10. Many people have a morbid curiosity about Victorian postmortem photos, and it’s important to counter urban myths with actual facts. As I said in that post, the Victorians had great respect for their dead, and didn’t use them like creepy Gumby props that could defy the laws of basic postmortem science.
“A Primer on Medieval Slavic Names,” the new addition to the Top 10, published 26 January 2018, at 709 views in 2022 and 1,506 total. This is right behind the above post in the overall view count, at #17. It’s quite a surprise to see this of all posts coming into the Top 10, since Medieval Slavic names don’t seem like the type of names someone would be actively researching like, say, French or Japanese names. Still, it’s nice to see the posts in this series getting so much traction and helping so many people looking for more information.
“A primer on Yiddish names,” published 27 January 2017, at 704 views in 2022 and 4,362 total. This is my seventh-most-viewed post of all time.
“Ideas for an original WWII book,” published 23 September 2013, at 662 views in 2022 and 2,512 total. This is its third year in my Top 10, and is now my tenth-most-viewed post. WWII and the Shoah are such popular hist-fic settings, but a lot of people falsely believe it’s the same story over and over again with different names and settings. Using a less-common premise and setting (e.g., a pacifist Mennonite family on the U.S. homefront, a neutral country like Portugal, soldiers in the China–India–Burma Theatre, refugees in Shanghai) will help to distinguish your story.
“A primer on Tatar names,” published 30 June 2017, at 636 views in 2022 and 4,059 total. This is my eighth-most-viewed post. Perhaps information about Tatar names is hard to find?
Two posts on my all-time Top 10 failed to make the 2022 Top 10:
“No, I will not get sucked into the cult of Arbonne!,” published 13 December 2013 and partially edited from something originally written for my old Angelfire site in 2010, with a mere 43 views in 2022 and 43,045 overall. This is still my most-viewed post by a landslide. If it’s because MLMs are finally sliding into obscurity and being seen as the toxic pyramid schemes they are, so much the better!
“A primer on Albanian names,” published 7 August 2015, with 262 views in 2022 and 2,816 overall. It was this year’s eleventh-most-viewed post, and is my ninth-most-viewed overall.
Welcome to My Magick Theatre 
Information on Tatar-anything or Tatarstan is hard to find.
[I have known this for about twenty years since a man called BatuKhan came into my online life – he was a proud Tatar Pole].
And I am glad people are discovering more Medieval Slavic names than Cyrus and Methodius.
[I think people glom on to Old Church Slavonic when they are reading an encyclopaedia of the old – or the new – school.
And possibly they may be making a conversion to Orthodoxy of some type or tradition].
Also people seem to like “Medieval anything” once they begin.
I wonder how many people click through the other “Decameron” posts?
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