My Regency History blog is 3 years old!

Rachel Knowles, author
of the Regency History blog

My Regency History blog is three years old this month. Since writing my first post What is the Regency? in October 2011, I have shared 188 posts, which have been read by an increasing number of people. According to Google analytics, my blog was visited 12,102 times during September 2014!

Statue of George IV, Brighton
from What is the Regency?

Thank you to everyone who has read and commented on my blog, either here or on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Your words of encouragement are really appreciated. Don't forget to sign up to my newsletter for a monthly round up of my posts and a specially written article about my news or research.

To celebrate, I thought that I would share with you my top ten blog posts. But how do you decide what your most popular blogs are? What do you think is the best way to measure your top ten blog posts?

All-time top ten posts according to Blogger

According to Blogger’s own statistics, my all-time top ten blog posts are as follows:

1. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
2. Mrs Fitzherbert
3. When is the Regency era?
4. Lady Elizabeth Foster, later Duchess of Devonshire
5. The rise and fall of Beau Brummell
6. 30 Beau Brummell quotes
7. Prince Edward, Duke of Kent
8. Headdresses and hairstyles for Regency evenings
9. Almack’s Assembly Rooms
10. Did Regency ladies ever get sunburnt?

Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire,
  from The Two Duchesses,
 Family Correspondence (1898)

All-time top ten posts according to Google analytics

The list on Google analytics is not quite the same. This may be because I did not activate Google analytics until March 2012 and so the figures do not include my first six months of blogging. However, I have noticed before that the statistics on Blogger and Google analytics are not the same, so clearly they derive their figures in slightly different ways.

1. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
2. When is the Regency era?
3. Lady Elizabeth Foster, later Duchess of Devonshire
4. The rise and fall of Beau Brummell
5. Prince Edward, Duke of Kent
6. Headdresses and hairstyles for Regency evenings
7. 30 Beau Brummell quotes
8. George IV and Queen Caroline: a disastrous royal marriage
9. When was the London season?
10. Princess Caroline of Brunswick

Mrs Fitzherbert does not even make the top ten, coming in at number 11. This post was written back in October 2011 and must have been visited a lot in the first six months!

Headdresses and hairstyles for Regency evenings

This year’s top posts

The trouble with all-time statistics is that earlier posts have a much better chance of ranking well as they have been around longer. But interestingly, looking at Google analytics just for the past year, the top ten is virtually identical, but with Mrs Fitzherbert taking over from Princess Caroline!

Mrs Fitzherbert
from Memoirs of George IV by Robert Huish (1830)

This month’s top posts

Narrowing the statistics down to just the past month, there are a few newcomers to the top ten, pushing out Beau Brummell quotes, Princess Caroline and her marriage:

• Jane Austen Festival 2014 Regency Promenade
• Queen Charlotte
• Regency History’s guide to the Mysteries of Udolpho

Natalie Garbett and Rachel Knowles
at the Jane Austen Grand
Regency Promenade in Bath

Top ten according to Google+

Another way of determining my top 10 is to look at the number of +1s my posts have received on Google+:

1. Lord Byron
2. George III
3. The First Georgians Exhibition (sadly now finished)
4. Queen Victoria’s christening
5. Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne
6. What can "The Sylph" tell us about its author, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire?
7. George IV
8. 30 Beau Brummell quotes and anecdotes
9. Two Little Princes: Prince Alfred
10. = Mary Anning and Princess Mary

However, I am not sure whether this is a good measure of success as it does not necessarily reflect the number of people who have actually visited the posts on my blog.

Lord Byron
from A Journal of the Conversations of 
Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington (1893)

Most comments

But perhaps visitor numbers is not an accurate gauge of a post’s success. Maybe the interactions that a post generates is more significant. On that basis, my most successful posts based on the number of comments left on my blog to date are:

1. Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
2. The Six Princesses: Princess Amelia
3. When is the Regency era?
4. A ball at Almack’s in 1815
5. Did Regency ladies ever get sunburnt?
6. When was the London season?
7. Jane Austen Festival 2014 Regency Promenade
8. How much did a ticket to a Regency ball really cost?
9. Princess Charlotte
10. George IV

A ball at Almack's in 1815 (annotated)
from Celebrities of London and Paris by Captain Gronow (1865)

All photographs © Andrew Knowles - www.flickr.com/photos/dragontomato