Last year I wrote up a big nothing about the stats here on my repository of garbage. This year I figured I’d do something similar but I’d dial it back a bit.

First off, here’s the top viewed stuff during 2011.

Post Title	Views
Modify an Arduino for DebugWIRE	4,952
(Yet Another) Sparkfun SerLCD library for Arduino	1,291
The Arduino Duemilanove with ATMega328 and that Reset Line	710
A Minimal Arduino Library for Processing Serial Commands	654
An Arduino Library for the ADT7310 SPI Temperature Sensor	478
So, you want to move to OSX Lion.	448
An Arduino-Based MIDI Wah Controller for Logic Pro	375
Using the Sparkfun Speakjet Voicebox Shield with an Arduino in Passthrough mode	268
A Too-Simple Arduino Library for Handling the Seeeduino Relay Shield (and Generic Relays)	257
Recovering Installed Firefox Extensions (i.e. – Socialite)	150
You don’t give a shit what I think of Duke Nukem Forever, and neither do I.	129
Don’t get Lien’d on in New Brunswick	118
Dark Sparkling Crystals	88
Why iBooks Sucks	79
Easily Melted	79
Pay No Attention to that Crap Behind the Curtain	69
Get yer mail from Thunderbird into GMail in Zero Steps	54
Late to the Party	50
Torchwood: Miracle Day Review and Analysis	46
Invalid Opcode at 0027 with Spinrite	45
Loop it through Jones	44

It’s no surprise that the “do my homework for me” posts are top of the list, as usual. Most people reading the OSX Lion post are either (a) trying to get it to run on their G5 (it won’t), or (b) trying to find out how to pirate it (pay the $29 you cheap fucks). The first music-related post you get that’s on the list is Dark Sparking Crystals, and the problem is those aren’t even real stats.

This year was the year of wordpress referrer spammers. I won’t go into the details of referrer spam, but essentially if I were to look at my stats for things, this is the sort of bullshit I’d see.

I even went as far as to change the url of Dark Sparkling Crystals (see what the url is there), and that didn’t have any effect. I’m sure if you’re a big time famous blawg that these things barely show on your radar, but in my case most of 2011 is made up of referrer spam.

The next highest musical bit was from Easily Melted, which was just a case of mistaken identity. Easily Melted – which was published in August 2009 – got a big bump in August 2010 from people searching for (natch) “Easily Melted.” I figured it was some political thing, given the results I see when I search for “easily melted”.

Late to the Party makes the list again as the post that’s the “next” post from the DebugWIRE post. People surf in to try and get the DebugWIRE post to do their homework for them, click the next, have to see Merlin Mann, then quit.

So yep, of the new music done in 2011. The most poopular was Loop it through Jones. The sad part of that was that unlike everything else I make, The Dolphin was the one piece of specifically crapped together just by tossing apple loops into an assemblage. That was a reaction to the accusation that all I did was “stick apple loops together” (which I don’t), and sure enough it becomes the most poopular. I can’t win.

You have to go a bit down the list to find the first original music post, and it’s The Rampart Part 1 from Rampant in the Carpark (35 views), which I think drags a lot of people in searching for “Reaping previous system.” The next one is XMESSTWOZEROONEONE from Tis the season to cash in (28 views), and think that’s because this blawg’s only reader Scott Redman pimped it out a lot before xmas.

I won’t bother detailing out a list of results like last year, but suffice to say that the median number of views for a musical post is 7.

I didn’t really get any fun search terms this year. Just things like “caustic soda instructions”, “steven cogswell asshole”,people with homework to do, and lots and lots of people looking to pirate osx for their G5.

The all-time champ for music is still 2009’s The X Stands for CASH (2009’s xmas bullshit). Now runing at 90 view.

The most popular downloads are the schematic from the “do my homework for me post” (420 downloads, which I’m sure is ironic), and the second being my SerLCD arduino library (225 downloads). I suppose it’s a mark of achievement when I find my libraries being reposted as other peoples’ work. Sigh.

So what about other things? This year I continued with Radio Reddit, which near as I can figure is pretty much dead. It overflows with people submitting music and nobody actually listening.

This year I submitted “Boardozer” and “Thumbtack”, and here’s my to-date-since-joining-Radioreddit stats. Last year’s AWXMASFY submission never got approved, so I never bothered trying submitting this years xmas crap.

I bet if you were to multiply the number of plays through by the number of listeners the results would be pretty poor. Also, nobody ‘submitted’ my music for voting this year – which only exemplifies the lack of interest in Radio Reddit.

I also bought “ad space” on Radio Reddit for two months (not to promote myself, for someone else) and while the Radio Reddit guys were really good at taking my money, I got zero communication from them. I was supposed to get statistics and such and got nothing. I emailed, I submitted questions and nobody would get back to me. So I gave up on that.

Back in September 2011 I joined Soundcloud, as it was the one site that will let you embed a player on a wordpress.com blawg. From the stuff I see people can’t figure out how to use the wordpress audio player. (Hence my Public service announcement for dorks). I thought maybe the Soundcloud one would be a little more obvious.

Soundcloud is pretty easy to use. The problem is their business model doesn’t fit for guys like me with tons of hours of material. The “Solo” level costs me €79 a year, and still “only” gets me twelve hours of storage space. The 2009-2011 stuff comes out to about 16 hours as it is, without counting what I call “the old music”. Hence I didn’t put any of the 2009 or earlier material on Soundcloud. The next tier up is a mind-numbing €131 a year, and I ain’t payin’ that much just to contribute to my loser hobby.

Soundcloud’s stats are flat-out confusing, and at one point there was a post from them acknowledging they were wrong. I’ve never been able to make sense of their charts. Here’s the best I can get you:

The problem with Soundcloud is that – unlike wordpress.com – if I look at my own stuff, even while logged in, it counts it as a view. So I have no clue how much of that is me, or is someone else. Pro tip: if you’re looking to game Soundcloud, you’ve just seen how. Most of Soundcloud seems to be made up of people who toss loops together and call themselves “DJ’s” anyway.

I did get a bit of hate mail this year, which I won’t bother talking about, and I did get one ‘thanks’ for the “help me do my homework” post. So, thanks. Scott Redman remains the only regular listener, near as I can tell. Scott’s a great guy.

I didn’t make it onto No Agenda this year, but I did make a new theme to replace my old theme for Starbase 66, the international Starlost podcast. I had a bunch of stingers show up on Here Goes Nothing, and For Those About to Rock, but it’s doubtful you would have noticed those unless you were on the lookout. My post on Duke Nukem Forever was enough to get me an appearance on a plodcast – which then got cancelled. I also made a terrible appearance on Starbase 66 #100, for some reason I haven’t figured out yet.

This year I tried to avoid doing as many “cover” pieces as I have in years past, since they just invite complaints. I did still manage to put a couple in, however. No lawsuits yet. From my own stats, Schwarzchild Radius, Boardozer, and The Rampart Part 1 were the ones I listened to myself the most. I did like the bit starting around 5:00 in Undisputed Wavyhate Champion (what a terrible title that is), and Last Drink Before the Abyss I think manages to mesh my amateurish ukulele playing with the rest of my amateurish playing. Will You was so well received someone thought it was a joke piece I’d ripped off from someplace else. Oh well.

Summary: 2011 sucked ass, but at least I didn’t smash any bones up this time. AWTFY.