Four Years On

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of Propnomicon. The first post back in 2007 featured a tutorial from Make on crafting your own vampire fangs. Since then there have been 1265 more posts, a number I never imagined I'd reach back then.

The basic focus of the blog is the same today as it was four years ago, but there have been some major changes. During the first two months of it's existence there were 22 visitors in total. Now the blog gets an average of just under a thousand hits a day. In total there have been 611,334 unique visits since the blog started, and 1,407,413 page views. Here's a look at the Sitemeter logs as of this morning.



That's all just a drop in the bucket to the traffic generated by one of the top tier tech blogs, but for one servicing a tiny niche audience it's pretty impressive. Here's a look at how the readership breaks down in terms of nationality over the last month.



Here are the most popular posts by subject over the same time frame.



While the growth in readership has been a real positive some other developments over the last year weren't quite so pleasant. I was slapped with cease and desist orders by two artists and received threats of legal action from a third. The first C&D was for linking to pictures of a prop being offered for sale that did, indeed, infringe the artist's copyright. I complied with that one and removed the link. The second was for linking to pictures of another prop that was in a private collection. I politely declined to comply with it and haven't heard a peep since.

The threatened lawsuit was a little more involved. The artist in question thought that the various "kits" I've featured infringed on his own work. I provided documentation for the existence of various vampire, werewolf, and witch hunting kits, not to mention embellished wunderkammer-style presentations of exotic creatures, stretching back into the early 20th century. When that wasn't enough I pointed out that his own work was simply a copy of those earlier efforts. That really set him off.

Eventually I had to drag the family lawyer into the picture. Helpfully, in addition to being an experienced advocate he happens to be a prop collector. Many of the items I've posted were destined for his own collection, and the first Antarctic expedition patch was created largely at his urging. Thanks to his efforts the absurd legal threats came to an end.

So that's where things stand with Propnomicon as it enters it's fifth year. I want to sincerely thank you for supporting not only the blog, but it's associated projects. It's been a real pleasure bringing it to you. I hope you'll find it even better in the year to come.