Kships two years

It is 20. July again, which means that Kships has been around for two years. It all started with this entry about the Princess Maria. Now of course, the tradition in situations like this is to say something like "oh, I can't believe it's been so long already" but to be fair I feel more like "I don't believe it's been only two years. Felt longer." It certainly feels more than a year ago that I wrote the Kships one year entry.

The original Kships header, with Peace Boat's Oceanic (currently bound for scrappers, sadly) departing Helsinki in the evening. Full photoset here.

Now what can I really say about the past year? More photographs have been put up (and occasionally there have been requests to use them elsewhere). In the spring there was a break in the updates (caused by the fact I was terribly busy writing my master's thesis), which also resulted in a drop in the visitor numbers - although these seem to be recovering now.

What else is there to say, really? There hasn't been anything worty of special notice going on during the past year. Most of the entries have been "regular ones" from Helsinki (although there were a few from Turku last autumn and now we're moving to Mariehamn for the next series of entries). There have been more article-style text-based entries than before, though apart from the sinking of the Costa Concordia -entry these do not seem to have attracted any particular notice.

For the next year... well, presumably things will continue much as before.

Header variant two, with the Viking XPRS arriving in Helsinki. Photoset (several, in fact) here.

Statistics:

During its total  history, Kships has been viewed 66 979 times - 39 040 times during the past twelve months (and 27 939 times in the first year), so there is a definite upwards trend, even with the drop in this spring. The busiest month of all time was July 2011 with a whopping 4 633 visitors, followed by January 2012 by 4 047 visitors. The least busy month of all times was September 2012 (670 views), the least busy month during the last year was April 2012 (2 332 views).

During the whole history of the blog (blogger doesn't give me per-year statistics) the single largest source of visitors has been Finland (unsurprisingly) with 35% of all visitors coming from my hope country. This has decreased notably, as last year Finns consisted of 46% of all visitors. Actually, here is a list of the top six visitor countries:

1. Finland - 35%
2. United States - 7% (up one place from 2011)
3. Sweden - 7% (down one place from 2011)
4. United Kingdom - 6%
5. Estonia - 4%
6. Germany - 4%

These are the countries which, interms of raw numbers, have managed more than 2 000 visitors. Estonia and Germany are (and were also last year) very close, hence the top six rather than top five.

The most popular browser remains Mozilla Firefox with a 37% share (down 5%), followed by Internet Explorer with 35% (down 2%) and Google Chrome with 17% (up 5%). Chrome's popularity seems to be on the rise, during the past few months it has rivalled Firefox and IE (since this is again the full two-years statistic I'm comparing to the first year's statistics, there is no accurate comparison as such).

This one you of course see every time you visit this place these days: the current Kships header, featuring the Marco Polo departing Helsinki in her Transocean Tours days. Full set here.

As for the sources of traffic, thanks to Blogger listing all the different national variants of Google as different websites (and giving me only the top ten) it is impossible to say much about the traffic sources. Google definately dominates, but the only other domain to make it into the top ten list is (unsurprisingly) the Finnish ship enthustiasts' forum maritimeforum.fi.

The most popular entry of all time remains Silja Symphony interiors, December 2009-February 2010, although steadily gaining on it is the entry on Gabriella's interiors from September-October 2010. Entries about interiors seem to be the most popular ones by a margin, with MSC Sinfonia and Silja Europa making up the top four.

Following the example of last year's anniversary day, there will probably be some kind of a special entry later today - presuming that I will have the time.