As usual WordPress prepared a quirky annual report for MissPres:

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 200,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 9 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

And I prepared my own, less quirky, perhaps less interesting report, as follows:

General Stats (Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2013)

Page Views: 206,860, from 173,520 in 2012 (and we just passed 600,000 total views this week)
Posts: 220, down from 293 in 2012, giving us 1,394 posts for your reading pleasure
Comments: 1,557, down from 2186 in 2012 (7,958 total)
Busiest day: 2,105 on September 4, 2013
Busiest month: 20,871 (October 2013)
E-mail Subscribers: 493, from 303 at the end of 2012.

And our monthly numbers:

For the fourth year in a row, our Mt. Holly post, written in February 2010, is far and away the top post, and the Abandoned Mississippi series shows up strongly in general. My wish for 2014, as for previous years, is that this will be the year that Mt. Holly gets a new owner and a new chance at life. It is horrible to hear reports about the continued and quickening decline of this Mississippi landmark.

This year, we gained a poster in Lolly Barnes, the new executive director of the Mississippi Heritage Trust. I’ve enjoyed reading about her work in various parts of the state and hope you have all gained a new perspective from her down-in-the-trenches preservation posts. We also said goodbye to JRGordon, who had faithfully kept us updated on preservation news from around the state, even with the diminishing access to news stories online.

We worked through Mrs. N.D. Deupree’s Historic Homes of Mississippi, first published as a two-part article in the Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society in 1902 and 1903. These articles deserve recognition as the earliest attempt at an architectural history of the state, and I found some of her insights to be helpful in interpreting some of our familiar antebellum landmarks. Suzassippi meanwhile has been creating a good catalog of New Deal-era buildings in her “New Deal in Mississippi” series that will help us begin looking at these twentieth-century landmarks as a group. Thomas Rosell continues to with his occasional Word of the Week series, but also teases out fascinating architectural stories like Vicksburg’s connection to uber-Modernist architect Paul Rudolph and introduces us to interesting architectural characters like “Briber Gibson.”

In 2014, I hope to get back to a more regular posting schedule–as you can see from the stats above, we had fewer new posts than in previous years, mostly due to my own drop in posting. Sometimes life gets in the way, and that’s been the case this year for me, but I’ve been glad that Thomas Rosell, Suzassippi and Lolly Barnes have kept up a steady stream of posts to keep MissPres going. Hopefully 2014 will bring me more time–I have plenty of posts in my head, but they haven’t made it into writing yet. I also hope we as Mississippi preservationists can help at least one endangered historic landmark get back into life by the end of this year. My personal list consists of Arlington, Mt. Holly, and Prospect Hill, but your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to make your own list and do something to help, whether that’s a $20 bill in the mail, a volunteer cleanup day, meeting with your mayor or city council, or calling and calling and calling recalcitrant owners who just need to sell to someone who will and can love their historic building. All of us can pitch in, light the corner where we are, and make 2014 a better year for Mississippi’s historic places than 2013 was. Let’s get going!

Categories: Historic Preservation