Hey guys! đŸ™‚ Well another year has gone by and once again it’s wasn’t a particularly great one for me health wise, but hey I’m still going (reasonably) strong and am looking forward to travelling again soon (on a fun holiday for a mates wedding where I’m on best man duties!) as it’s been a few years! So as usual this is the time of the year that I look back on the year, check out all the stats and report on how things have been going for Blake’s Sanctum and talk about what’s to come!
In last years round up I commented that Blake’s Sanctum website traffic had dropped from the usual 10,000+ a year visitors however it turned out that once again the old counter site I was using was not working properly and was being blocked by most browsers due to being classic http and not https SSL certified. Then the whole counter site died completely! So in actual fact I probably did have the usual amount of visitors in 2021 but just couldn’t see them due to these issues. So in 2022 I got another counter, then that died, then another counter that seems to only work sometimes, plus I had issues with people going to the old http version of my site and not getting redirected to the certified https version (which I’ve just fixed) and the counter only worked on one and not the other, so I’ve had no friggin luck with this lol. It’s currently sitting on 77,747 so it’s safe to say I DID actually hit the big 70,000 mark this time last year and I’m probably actually around the 80,000 mark now if not more! I should look into counters I can host myself as all the free ones out there hosted elsewhere are useless these days!
My wordpress blog here has suffered a legit drop in hits though as last year I was closing in on 45,000 continuing the blogs usual form of around 10k hits a year too however right now it’s on just over 51,000 hits so only just over 5k this year. I’ve been posting more news than previous years so reasons could be lack of work on my main website and some of my most popular posts (eg the 2017 Star Trek Birth of The Federation 2 projects post) becoming old and moving down the ranking in google searches. This years top post appears to be my Walking Dead Webisodes post where I try to keep track of where people can watch all these not so well known extra side stories from the WD universe.
All my blog news posts are copied over to my Patreon page too which would increase my news hit totals however Patreon don’t give seem to give total annual views stats so who knows how many visitors I’ve had there lol. However I’m very pleased that my first (& probably last lol) Patreon Jack is still with me after a year, thank you sir! I believe Jack originally decided to support me because of my lost Civilization 2 scenario preservation work which had some brilliant successes this year with donors giving me some huge collections to add to the repository resulting in literally thousands of lost fan creations and some truly awesome scenarios I’d been looking for being found and saved!
Once the Civ2 MGE preservation work was completed (at least until the next scenario collection donation comes) mid year, I then set about getting back to work on my huuuuge Civilization 2 tour video I’ve been working on for years (which the scenario preservation work all feeds into) and then also finally got back to working on finishing all my own Civ2 scenario mod projects. I’m pleased to say that as soon as I’m back from my holiday I’ll be able to start releasing all my Civ2 mods and videos meaning 2023 will finally be the year where I finish up most of my Civ2 work and can move on to Test of Time and do a bit of preservation work along with releasing a couple of scenarios I’ve made for that too. This is a big step in me moving on in the Civilization series and wrapping up all the videos and the big Civilization series section website work, finally freeing me up to play more other games and work on other new sections of the site as well as updating old sections (I keep word docs with all the new fan projects I find & the lists are getting massive!).
Speaking of me working on the website I just wanted to say I haven’t totally neglected it over the past few years lol! As previous posted I decided to start paying for a website host giving me the space I needed to solve all my image hosting issues. I then painstakingly fixed broken image links across the site replacing all the old dead Photobucket links with new locally hosted ones (although I’ve still gotta replace some of my newer Imgur ones but at least they still work for now so replacing them is not urgent). I also did a bit of work to update the old WIP Final Fantasy Series tribute page making it more accessible and ‘ready’ for adding game tributes to, I also then used it as a template to create 2 more preliminary WIP pages for the other 2 sections I’m planning to create on the site over the next few years, a Resident Evil Series tribute page and a Wonder Boy Monster World Series tribute page. A few times over the last couple of years I’ve wanted to get started on adding tributes but because the pages weren’t setup I deemed it too much work time I should be spending on continuing work on the Civilization section, so it feels to good to have finally laid the foundation for me easily adding tributes to them in the future. I’ve hinted at these new sections over the last few years but I guess you can consider this an official announcement that these new game series sections will be coming to Blake’s Sanctum haha!
And lastly once again because of nearly all my free time going into the Civilization work not much has happened over on the Blake’s Sanctum Youtube channel this year. In fact I think I’ve only released one video this year which is terrible lol, I’m going to start getting “are you dead?” comments on my channel again at this rate lol! I’ve actually filmed a whole bunch of videos from LAN parties and my own gaming sessions however because of all the Civ video work I keep delaying them. So I’ll work to remedy that and get some of these other gaming videos out there in Feb/March after my holiday. Then once I start releasing the big Civ2 videos the channel will really come to life again as I’ve got so much content in the pipeline (literally gigs of unreleased recordings I’ve got backed up on like 3 portable hard drives cause I’m scared of losing it all lol). Anyway despite my inactivity the channel finally hit the big 1000 subscribers earlier in the year and nearly 200 more wonderful people have subbed me since. Sadly because my total public watch hours time is still below 4,000 I still can’t re-monetize the channel which is annoying but hopefully once I push out all the content that’ll change things! However in the end it’s not the end of the world as I don’t create videos to make money, I create them to share my love of great gaming/modding content with fellow fans!
Well I think that’s enough rambling for this year. Thank you everyone who has supported my site over the years. Hope you all had a lovely Christmas and let’s knock down some retro gaming goals in 2023! đŸ™‚
PS – Oh and I haven’t done a list of site changes since 2018 so here’s a new one below covering everything I’ve done since then…
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Have found a interesting up & coming 2024 retro fantasy turn-based 4X strategy indie game called Mystical Conquests that has a very classic Master of Magic like feel plus a bit of Heroes of Might & Magic thrown in too, however the author actually lists Civilization, Age of Wonders and Final Fantasy Tactics as it’s main inspirations. Naturally the game contains all the usual 4X fantasy strategy genre hallmarks of exploring a world map filled with lairs & treasures, building & developing cities, researching new technologies, fighting battles with heroes & armies of creatures, item crafting and spell casting too. The 8bit style graphics and sound give a very nice retro feeling, and the system requirements are accordingly low. If you feel curious about testing & giving the developer some feedback, there is a playable demo available on Steam.
I’ve already posted about this one previously but I’m super excited about the new 
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