Sunday, January 1, 2012

Happy New Year 2012

Happy New Year and welcome to 2012.

2011 was an amazing year for my blog and I owe a lot of that you all, my readers. I went from having barely a couple hundred hits of month at the end of 2010 to over a hundred hits a day (leading to thousands of hits a month). The final three months of the year have been record breakers with each month greatly exceeding the previous one. The fact that December's number of hits nearly reached 5,600 is more than I ever could have imagined! I would love to see the traffic levels to sustain and/or continue to grow as word of mouth spreads. If you like what you are reading, please share the links with others (repost, retweet, etc.).

So, you're probably wondering what to expect here at Martin's View for the new year. I actually did a little bit of thinking about that as December 2011 was coming to a close.


I thought first about the direction the blog took last year - thanks to seeing someone on Twitter doing a blog about "the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". I thought about how much I love music and my iPod, and how that could translate into daily album reviews. Clearly, my readers enjoy music a lot as well (based on your comments here, on Twitter and on Facebook). So, it is pretty much a no-brainer for me to continue with the music posts in 2012.

Besides using the birthdays of artists to help me pick records to present, I am going with another sub-theme for 2012. 2012 marks the 30th anniversary of albums released in 1982 (which was the later half of my junior year and first half of my senior year of high school). What better way to celebrate that then to pepper in my blog posts with albums that were released in 1982 and would be celebrating three decades in the music collective. Some will be well-known; some will be obscure. It should be interesting.

Seventies Saturday will still continue as well. I enjoy taking a jump back to that decade when I was a kid and starting to form my musical tastes. Soundtrack Sunday will also be back, but not quite every week (in part because my list of film soundtracks is shrinking a bit). For those off weeks I may consider a second dose of Seventies or perhaps even dip back into the Sixties. And, of course, we'll see posts about new album releases as well.

Switching gears, TV programs I watch will continue to be reviewed as well. It seems a lot of people love Survivor which comes back in February. And Once Upon a Time has definitely been a hit new series this year. Focus on both of those will continue as well as other shows too.

Book reviews, film reviews and DVD reviews will also continue to be presented from time to time. I love being able to share new finds with you all.

So, I hope you plan to stick around and continue to offer me feedback. I am definitely listening to what my readers have to say.

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