Annual Report

The Forteana blog has survived its first year! When I started it in January 2011, it was only meant as a quick test to work out how to use Blogger... hence the rather unimaginative title. But since then I’ve done 130 posts, on a wide range of topics including (clockwise from top left): unusual museums, weirdness in renaissance art, out-of-place aliens, folklore, cryptozoology, retro-futuristic science, ancient civilizations and witchcraft.

Much to my surprise, I see that I’ve had 47,000 page views -- an average of 360 views per post. So a big “Thank You” to everyone who reads the site and links to it... especially Patrick Huyghe and Rick Stokes at The Anomalist, who are by far my most consistent referrers! I’m also grateful to the various people who’ve supplied me with material when I was in danger of running out of ideas... particularly Paul Jackson, who has travelled the world in search of photographs for the blog (or more accurately, he’s travelled the world taking photographs, which he’s then kindly let me post on the blog).

An obvious mistake to make when starting a blog is to post all your good material early on, before anyone has started reading it. That’s what I did, and it’s meant that some posts that were really interesting (in my biased opinion) have languished with virtually no page views. In this context, I could mention: Dinosaur Orbit, Precogging Philip K. Dick, Nick Pope at the MOD, Seth Shostak on SETI and Cosmic Geometry in the West Country.

Several of the earliest posts were based on letters that I’d sent to Fortean Times over the years, but were never printed. These included The Da Vinci Code and Mediaeval Symbolism, The Great Moon Hoax and Alien Simulacrum (left). As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, my success rate at FT has shot up over the last few months -- I’ve even got a full-page “Forum” article in the current issue. I’m getting very bigheaded about this -- I’ve just set up a new web page to keep track of my appearances in Fortean Times!