Savannah Unplugged is almost three years old, but sometimes it seems a lot older than that . . .
I haven’t been posting quite as much here in recent months since I launched the music blog hissing lawns, but this blog continues to be an interesting adventure.
And it has sure told me a lot about what my largely Savannah-based audience wants to read, what types of posts attract search traffic, and other details I could only discover through running a site.
So here, with a little commentary, are the 13 most-read posts on Savannah Unplugged in 2013.
This blog doesn’t get all that much traffic really — I’m averaging about 300 page views/day in recent months. Only rarely do posts here get over 1,000 views, and many are only read by a couple of dozen people.
But a post had to get over 775 views to make my top 13 in 2013.
13: A few thoughts on the passing of Ben Tucker
What a tragedy in early June. This was a pretty quick post on the day that Ben died, but included some quotes, a video, and pics from the 2012 Savannah Jazz Festival. I suspect I would have gotten even more hits on my photos of the second line procession after Ben’s funeral, but some folks who should have linked to that post chose to download photos and post them to private Facebook pages — a frustrating puzzle.
12: Kanye West video projections in Savannah on Saturday night
So this didn’t even happen, but it was an interesting testament to the power and immediacy of the internet to disperse information. For the most part, young people — i.e., not the core Savannah Unplugged readers — were looking for information on the the Kanye West projections, and they found my blog in huge numbers on that particular afternoon.
11: Private Savannah screening of “CBGB†gets a good reaction
There was obviously a huge amount of local interest in CBGB when it filmed in Savannah in 2012 (Rupert Grint! Alan Rickman!), and that interest carried over to the anticipation of the release. I wasn’t invited to this private screening at the SCAD Museum of Art, but I did give the film a disappointing review when I saw it months later.
10: Mayans in Georgia?. . . Here we go again
I can’t believe how much traffic this post got — almost all from search engines. A few spurious claims on cable TV and — boom — viewers are ready to ignore the findings of serious researchers. This post also got hundreds of hits in the final days of 2012.
9: A Savannah intersection voted third worst in the nation
I’m proud to live in a city where posts like this can generate 1,000+ page views on a blog. A large portion of our citizens are interested in traffic, transit, urban design, architecture, and other subjects that deal with the public realm.
8: About the size of new apartments at 61st and Abercorn . . . .
Ditto from #9 above. I agree that the new apartments on 61st near Habersham Village are a little tall, in part because the ground had to be raised a few feet. But the height was otherwise within the longstanding zoning limits, and other objections — especially parking and noise — later proved largely unfounded (as I suspected they would be).
7: Mary Lee — a 16.5 foot, 3500 lb. great white shark — in surf off Jacksonville
The work of OCEARCH has been fun to follow — especially when a huge great white is in the surf break just down the shoreline. Again, this was one of those posts that generated a ton of search traffic since so few publications covered the story relative to the amount of public interest.
6: The Greyboy Allstars booked for SCAD’s new alumni graduation concert in Forsyth Park
1,200 hits? Really? I think in part this post did so well because of the thoroughness of the title, which has all the key search terms: SCAD, new alumni, graduation, concert, and Forsyth Park.
5: So what’s up with Savannah’s future Whole Foods?
Whole Foods eventually opened in late summer, of course, but this post from late April included an embedded tweet with the scheduled opening date as well as pics of the site. Not everyone in Savannah fully appreciated what a big development this was for the city, but regular readers and random searchers simply ate up any information about Whole Foods before it opened.
4: Chipotle opening in mid-September in Savannah
I made a couple of other posts about Chipotle after this one, both of which got many hundreds of hits. Again, the vast majority of the traffic for this post came from search traffic. People like reading about what’s new, and people like reading about popular chains like Whole Foods and Chipotle.
3: No, Mumford & Sons is not playing SCAD’s new alumni concert in Forsyth Park
A clever hoax went viral. Debunking it attracted well over 2,000 views.
2: When The Rolling Stones stayed in Savannah. . .
Yes, people love anything having to do with celebrities, but this post wasn’t just pandering to that impulse. The Stones stayed in Savannah in 1965, just after appearing for the second time on the Ed Sullivan show. With the help of friends online, we pinpointed where they stayed and took photos of the motel as it appears today on US 17/Ogeechee Road. I’m glad that so many people seem to have gotten pleasure out of this post.
1: An interview with actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers from 2000, unpublished until now
Published almost exactly a year ago, this post continues to get 5-10 hits per day from search traffic or links from forums or sites devoted to Jonathan Rhys Meyers. What a fascinating character he is, but he was in some ways even more interesting back in 2000 when I interviewed him at The Groucho Club in London. I was freelancing for Contents Magazine at the time, but the edited interview never appeared. This lengthy post is pretty much just a raw transcript — and I think the quality of the unedited interview speaks very highly of the young actor.