As we bid adieu to 2015, and march toward this little blog’s 7th anniversary in February, let’s take inventory of how MissPres did this last year.

Our big milestone was reaching 1 million views, which would have been exciting, but it happened the same day as our beloved Mt. Holly, a building this blog and many Delta preservationists have fought to pry out of the dirty hands of its Texas-based owned for many years, burned, leaving only the sturdy brick walls standing.

General Stats (Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2015)

• Page Views: 303,382, from 257,127 in 2014
• Average Views per day: 801, up from 704 in 2014 and from 56 views per day in our first year, 2009. When I started MissPres, my goal was to have 100 views per day, which seemed like more than could ever possibly happen.
• Posts: 224, up from 203 in 2014 and from 220 in 2013, giving us 1,821 titillating posts for your reading pleasure
• Comments: 1,475, down from 1,557 in 2014 and way down from 2,186 in 2012 (10,746 total). Note: I think WordPress has changed the way it counts “Trackbacks,” links to a post from another posts, which it used to count as comments but now apparently doesn’t, so numbers from earlier years may be inflated.
• Busiest day: 4,256 on June 17, 2015 (with most of those views on the Mt. Holly posts)
• Busiest month: 34,239 (June 2015)
• E-mail Subscribers: 782, from 650 at the end of 2014.

Top Posts

Mt. Holly, June 2015. Photo by Hank Burdine, courtesy of MDAH Historic Preservation Division.

Here’s a breakout of the top posts for 2015. “Abandoned Mississippi” continued to dominate, which doesn’t make me happy, especially since the two top abandoned sites, Mt. Holly and Kuhn Hospital, will probably be gone from the landscape in the next year or so. The preliminary, longer-than-101 places list for Mississippi beat out the culled-down, plain ol’ “101 Mississippi Places to See Before You Die,” perhaps proving definitively that Mississippians believe that “More is more” rather than following Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is more” maxim. I was happy to see that my personal favorite post of the year, Madisonia, about Mississippi’s lost Greco-Roman colony, is in the top tier, and Thomas Rosell’s plaintive 2012 query “What is Rock Lath?” continues to be strong.

Commenters

Bloggers live and die for interaction with readers through comments, and this year, our post with the most comments was Thomas Rosell’s popular November 2015 post, Biloxi Cemetery Canopies, with 24 comments. Top commenters for the year, gstone repeats with top honors–thanks to all who take time to read, share with others, and leave thoughts, information, or disagreements.

• gstone: 73 comments
• surpie1940: 37 comments
• beauregard rippy: 28 comments
• Victoria Moon Conway: 25 comments
• Beth: 23 comments

Series

This year, Suzassippi continued her popular New Deal series, traveling far and wide along Mississippi’s backroads to find schools, courthouses, community houses, and other useful structures erected under the Depression-era federal programs. In April, a week of ferocious competition in the “Name This Place: Sign Edition” brought out contestants from all over the MissPres universe to identify mystery signs from historic places around the state, and at the end, we had a new “Mississippi Preservationist Extraordinaire,” Victoria Moon Conway–congratulations! The main reason I like to administer the Name This Place contests is so that I don’t have to be a contestant because I know I would lose to all you eagle-eyed architecture buffs.

What’s next?

For 2016, I hope to continue the Craftsman series, because I’m enjoying it and I hope you are too, and this year, come hell or high water, I plan to finally implement my long-planned series highlighting the photographs and measured drawings produced by the Historic American Buildings Survey, affectionately known as HABS.

Maybe you have a post or series of posts you’d like to see, or better yet, would like to contribute. We welcome new contributors, so just ask! Maybe you’ve got an interest in a particular architect or builder and you’ve photographed many of his buildings. Or maybe you’re into a certain architectural period or style and would like to share your insights and photos. Or, my prayers would be answered if a news hound would volunteer to take over the News Roundups, which I started and will keep doing, but I would really prefer to pass it off to someone with more time and energy for it.

Mostly, my goal for 2016 is to keep chugging along and hope that MissPres will play a small role in saving, maintaining, and otherwise preserving Mississippi’s historic places. Preservationists are a minority, but we can be a powerful one if we just get out there and work together.

Happy 2016, y’all!

Categories: Historic Preservation

Tags: Featured