Kships 1st anniversary

Kships has now been around for exactly one year, with the 1st entry posted on 20 July 2010 at 14.42 Finnish summer time. To commemorate the occasion I thought that I'd share with you a bit about the background and statistics of the blog's first year in addition to sharing with you the interior photographs of the Isabella from 17 years ago posted earlier today.

Ultimately the fault of Kships coming to life can be laid at the door of my ship photographer friend Sergei Pennonen (his website here) who once last summer while we were in Lauttasaari photographing this or that ship commented that I only photograph for my own pleasure as I don't post my photos anywhere. A few days afterwards I thought "why not?" and started planning this place.

I had planned on calling the blog Kship, singular, but that name had already been taken so I had to come up with a more creative solution. Originally I planned to put just photographs on the blog, accompanied with technical data and a minimal amount of text, but as I kept adding more entries textual accompaniments to the photographs became increasingly complex.

During the first month I really went crazy with posting entries. During 11 days in July that the blog was up I posted 23 entries, or an average of two per day, and in August 41. After that I subsided to a more sedate pace (in part thanks to my studies taking up a larger chunk of my time) and from the beginning of this year I've attempted to maintain a schedule with about two entries per week.

The original Kships header image was this photograph of Peace Boat's Oceanic from 8 June 2009. In an attempt at neutrality I removed the company markings from the hull and funnel (I admit I also think the ship looks better without them).

Some statistics

During the past 12 months Kships has been viewed 27 939 times. The least busy month was September 2010, with just 670 views and the busiest April 2011 with 3 544 views. April's record also coincides with an article by me being published for the first time at Maritime Matters, which in part explains the increased number of visitors (though it's only about 500 more than during the preceeding month). This month has a chance of being another record breaker, with 2 616 views to date and a third of the month still to go. This time the increased number of views are most likely due to increased visibility at Maritime Matters and the Finnish-language message board maritimeforum.fi. In 2010 the average number of views per month was around 1 000. For 2011 it has jumped, for no reason I can discern, to around 3 000 per month.

On nationalities, of the 27 939 page views 12 752 or 46% have originated from Finland. Number 2 spot is held by Sweden with 1 925 views (7%), followed by the US (1 684 views, 6%), UK (1 466, 5%) and Estonia (1 107, 4%). 42% of visitors use Firefox as their browser, 37% use Internet Explorer and 12% use Google Chrome. This is good as I use Firefox and therefore the page looks most like it's supposed to on that browser.

The four most important sources of traffic are Google (in all it's variations), maritimeforum.fi, Maritime Matters and Ulkomatala, the Finnish-language webmagazine I contribute to. The most popular individual entries are ones featuring interior photographs, the single most popular one being the entry on Silja Symphony's interiors from December 2009-February 2010. However, the entry calcular is perhaps not truly indicative of popularity as I've built the blog's internal navigation system around tags rather than individual entries.

The current header image shows the Viking XPRS arriving in Helsinki on 3 May 2009 (the entry this is from was one of the earliest posted). I'm currently planning a new header with a slightly different logo and layout. If you have any ideas on which ship or even individual photo should have the honour, please feel free to comment and tell me.