1000 Posts!

I celebrate two types of milestones on this blog: the blog's birthday (which is shortly after SWTOR's birthday every year in December) and every time I've written another 100 posts. The 900 post milestone happened back in June last year, at which point I expected to hit the big thousand in April or May of 2020. I think it was mainly the lull I found myself in during the months just before the launch of Onslaught that led to me missing that target by a little bit - which is only a shame in so far as a commenter pointed out that it would have been cool if I could have timed it so that the 1000th post was published on the 4th of May.

Anyway, this is the 1000th post now! In the past I've used these milestones to look at something related to blog statistics: mostly funny search terms that led people to the blog, but more recently also items such as which posts have been the most popular over time. I thought that for this one I'd do something slightly different though, and talk about my blog tags or labels.

Tags or categories are among a healthy blog's best features in my opinion, and I always love it when other bloggers make good use of them, as it makes it much easier to find specific content that interests you. I use my own tags all the time as well when trying to find older posts that I've written on certain subjects.

They can also provide insights into just what a blogger writes about most often though, so that's the angle I've decided to take this time around. Let's look at and talk about the blog's twenty most frequently used tags:

1. screenshots (636)

Now this very first tag is a bit of a funny one, because you might very well ask: "Why is this even a thing? Don't most of your posts contain screenshots?" The answer is yes, and this tag is evidence of that, proving that apparently 63.6% of my posts do in fact contain screenshots. However, this wasn't always the case. To this day I remain the kind of blogger who's more focused on the written word than on fancy images, but I've certainly mellowed and use them a lot more often now than I did in the past.

Basically, when I started this blog, I used them rarely enough that whenever I did include one or more screenshots it felt like something that was worth noting, and I sometimes used the tag to quickly check back on whether I had used certain screenshots in a post before or not. At this point this has become somewhat of a moot point, both because most of my posts contain screenshots anyway and because a category with 636 entries in it is not something you can casually scan for what you've used before. But it's there, so I'll keep using it.

2. quests (183)

Considering that story content is the bread and butter of Star Wars: The Old Republic, it shouldn't be a surprise that "quests" is the second most used tag on this blog. After all, every new piece of story is delivered in the form of a quest - or missions as the game officially calls them, since it came out in the days of "we're trying to differentiate ourselves from WoW by using different terms for everything".

I only wish that I'd thought of coming up with a separate "story" tag early on, because sometimes I want to talk about wider story developments such as the Republic vs. Empire conflict and then it feels a bit weird to just tag that with "quests". However, considering it's what I've been using for more than eight years now, it would be weird to change things up at this point, unless I ever feel like going back through one thousand posts and retroactively tagging some of them "story" where appropriate. I can't even rule that out entirely, considering some of the ways in which I've been spending my time this year, but it's unlikely.

3. operations (152)

Speaking of using different terms for everything, here we have SWTOR's term for raids. I'm a raider, so I talk about them a lot. Makes sense. Then again, you could argue that considering how much of my time in game I spend running operations, it's actually kind of impressive that I "only" talk about them 15.2% of the time and don't mention them at all in the other 84.8% of posts.

4. swtor general (145)

This is a generic catch-all term for things that I find hard to categorise, such as the game's population, server merges, content cycles, comparisons between expansions etc. I'm actually kind of surprised that it's "only" in fourth place - clearly I manage to be specific about my subjects more often than not.

5. pvp (142)

I don't consider myself that much of a PvPer, but I guess PvP being the fifth most used tag on the blog paints a slightly different picture. It's not my number one way of passing the time, but it's clearly a fixed staple of my in-game diet.

6. flashpoints (126)

Flashpoints are in a similar boat as I enjoy doing them quite regularly, but considering just how much I love them I'm kind of surprised they rank below PvP in terms of how much I talk about them on the blog. Maybe I like thinking about them more than I actually spend time running them (which would make them sort of the opposite of my stance towards PvP I guess).

7. guild (126)

My guild is awesome so it deserves to be mentioned a lot! This seems appropriate.

8. community (124)

This is a tag that I like to use for a variety of community-related subjects, from how people behave in pugs to links to other fan sites or content creators. I've long known that I care about community a lot, so I guess it makes sense that it would come up in my blog posts reasonably often, but I was still kind of surprised to see it in the top ten. 

9. companions (121)

Another one of SWTOR's staples, so no surprise that the tag associated with them is in my top ten, even if my general impression has long been that I seem to worry/care less about my companions than the average player seemingly does.

10. patch (102)

My first thought on seeing this number was: "Has SWTOR even had 102 patches?!" So I checked the official patch notes page, and at the time of writing this it currently lists 276 numbered patches - huh. I'm sure I didn't actually cover most of them though, and most of these posts were probably about a small handful of larger patches... but still interesting, I guess.

11. gear (99)

I didn't think I cared that much about gear?! Am I that shallow? The blog says yes!

12. silly (93)

I often am, and so are my guildies, so this checks out.

13. grouping (90)

As a big fan of group content and someone who's very interested in all the dynamics surrounding it, it makes sense to me that this is a tag that I use a lot. Then again, we're talking 90 out of 1000 posts here... is 0.9% really a lot?

14. knights of the fallen empire (89)

Now this one I found really interesting because no other expansion tag has been used nearly as often. The next one in line would be Knights of the Eternal Throne with 49 uses, and that despite of that expansion lasting three times as long as KotFE. I think it's because I mainly use expansion tags when I'm specifically talking about an expansion's story content or new game-changing features that were a part of it. KotFE came with a huge amount of story content (it took me 17 posts just to cover all the story chapters) and the switch to monthly chapters, introduction of level sync and general side-lining of group content was a huge paradigm shift that caused a lot of friction at the time and made for a lot of good blogging material, even if it also caused players a fair amount of heartache.

15. pugs (85)

I like joining pick-up groups and talk about this often. Once again, this checks out.

16. levelling (83)

I also like levelling alts - maybe not as much as some, but it's certainly something that comes up every so often.

17. npcs (80)

This tag is kind of related to what I said about "quests" earlier and mostly focuses on notable characters and their roles in the story. Though sometimes it can also be a bit random.

18. warzones (80)

I gave warzones a separate tag to distinguish tales about specific matches from general PvP talk about things like class balance etc. but also from world PvP. Most of the time the two do still go together, but not all the time.

19. links (75)

I think I originally created this tag to mark posts where I was doing a lot of linking to other content creators or fan sites, but then I also started using it for posts that do a lot of interlinking within the blog itself. I'm not actually sure that's very useful at this point, but like the screenshots tag it's there so I might as well keep using it.

20. videos (74)

As much as I call myself a blogger rather than a YouTuber, videos are a thing I also create sometimes, and when I feature them I use this tag. It's not just for my own videos though, but also for videos from other people, official trailers etc.

Anyway, that's that. Just a little journey looking into the sort of subjects I like to write about the most. What about you, dear readers? Do you ever use tags to find things? Or am I just the sort of person that can be a bit obsessive about sorting/categorising things?

(By the way, I was going to tag this post with "blog" and all twenty labels featured in it, but Blogger won't let you have more than twenty tags and I didn't want to drop just one, so nothing but "blog" it is.)