Happy 3rd birthday

Today, Panfilocastaldi turns 3. We have survived another full year of blogging. We have narrowed our focus somewhat, engaging more deeply with events in Melbourne. We are writing less about art and photography, and more about architecture and architectural practice.

Our posts have become less frequent, but also longer and, we hope, more insightful. We were pleased this year to have our first articles published in other online outlets and print media. Our favourites from the past 12 months:

• Chutzpah. The first of 10 things one needs to start an architecture practice.
• Sharing is better than hoarding. A rallying call to the architecture profession to get better at sharing knowledge, processes and resources.
• The invisible profession. Generated contact from the legal department of the Australian Institute of Architects, identifying our unauthorised use of the AIA logo and instructing its removal. A plea to Victorian Chapter Manager and national CEO was to no avail. We removed the image and remain bemused that our first official contact was a legal sanction.
• Dear Sir or Madam. An open letter to architecture graduates revealing how to write a better job application. Useful too: we now direct all hopeful applicants to read and learn from it.
• The legacy of Robin Boyd. Our first commissioned article, for the March 2013 issue of Architecture Australia. Republished here 7 months later unedited and in full.
• Pretoria travelling studio. Our first article by a guest contributor, Jake Taylor.
• Out of Practice and Small projects. Reviews of lectures from inspiring international architects, Gregg Pasquarelli of New York and Kevin Low of Kuala Lumpur.
• Material 2013: An overview. The AIA 2013 architecture conference in review.
• Vote Flinders Street: conclusion. The last of many articles examining the much hyped Flinders Street Station international design competition.
• Bad architecture drives out good. A treatise on the demise of the built environment, and what we can do about it.

Once again, we have synthesised this year’s key statistics into a series of infographics:

And some highlights in plain English:

• 43 new posts, with a maximum of 11 in April of this year.
• 19 current post categories, up from 18 last year. 7 categories received no new articles, evidence of our shift in writing focus, while Architecture and Architecture practice, the 1 new category, each received 22.
• 139 new tags, bringing the total to 1,122 and ranging from Stalinism (1 post) to Australia (26 posts).
• 135 new comments, up from 84 last year and bringing the total to 331.
• An exponentially increasing 13,605 new spam comments, up from 2,055 last year and 408 the year before. This represents 98% of all comments making their way onto Panfilocastaldi.
• 40,479 new page views, bringing the total a touch past the magic 100,000 to 103,398.
• A slight reduction in our readership from last year, down from 120 to 111 page views a day. Our busiest month this year was surprisingly January, which has previously been amongst our quietest, with 5,534 page views or an average of 179 per day.
• Visitors from 154 different countries, ranging from Papua New Guinea (1 page view) to Australia (13,649 page views). Australia now outranks the United States as our number 1 source of visitors by a significant margin.
• 25,188 referrals from search engines, comprising thousands of unique terms predominantly in English, but also in Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Dutch. Our favourite, surely based on spoken words misheard, was, miss van dero.
• 3,582 referrals from 210 other websites, with a maximum of 881 of Twitter, supplanting Facebook as our primary social media platform.
• 83 blog followers, more than doubling our count of 39 this time last year, with a further 14 comment followers and 296 Twitter followers.

Thank you for your support this year. Who knows what 2014 will bring for us, or how Panfilocastaldi will evolve? For now, it continues to be a labour of love, self-sustaining because it is enjoyable for its own sake. If you promise to keep reading and commenting, we’ll promise to keep posting and replying.

Yours sincerely,
Warwick Mihaly, Erica Slocombe and Dew Stewart.