Happy 5th birthday

Today, Panfilocastaldi turns 5. I have survived another full year of blogging. Over the years, my focus has gradually shifted and sharpened, away from art, photography and the environment, and towards the culture, practice and business of architecture. I’m proud of the content I produce, and the way it has struck a chord amongst the Australian architecture profession.

This year, I published on average one post every nine days, helped along somewhat by my August series of daily lessons for design students. I’ve had articles co-published in Parlour, Architecture & Design and Interns Australia. My favourites of the past 12 months:

• Why I’m a member of the AIA, and its follow up piece, A better AIA. An exploration of the value proposition of the Australian Institute of Architects.
• Melbourne School of Design. A review of the new architecture building at the University of Melbourne.
• Learning from lawyers. To survive as a profession, we need to learn how to better protect ourselves.
• The mystery of marketing. What marketing works for my architecture studio, Mihaly Slocombe, and what doesn’t.
• On being an architect and a dad. Is there a typical picture of the life of a working father? If so, I don’t think it fits mine. Co-published with Parlour.

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

And some highlights in plain English:

• 41 new posts, with a maximum of 17 in August of this year.
• 20 post categories, 7 of which received new articles. My most prolific category this year, Lessons, received 22.
• 106 new tags, bringing the total to 1,346 and ranging from Stratosphere (1 post) to Australian Institute of Architects (33 posts).
• 86 new comments, bringing the total to 533.
• 4,320 new spam comments, bringing the total to 29,616.
• 39,730 new page views, bringing the total to 180,649.
• An average of 109 page views per day. Our busiest month this year was August with 6,942 page views or an average of 224 per day.
• Visitors from 153 different countries, ranging from Belize (1 page view) to Australia (14,333 page views).
• 12,347 referrals from search engines, comprising thousands of unique terms. Lots of Some great practice-related long tail search terms this year included disadvantages of negotiated tendering process and design brief for construction a house.
• 5,861 referrals from 128 other websites, with a maximum of 3,112 from Facebook. This smashed Twitter for social media referrals, which only provided 479.
• 175 blog followers, increasing our count by 40 over this time last year, with a further 22 comment followers and 739 Twitter followers.

Thank you for your support this year. Who knows what 2016 will bring, 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, I’ll promise to keep typing.

Yours sincerely,
Warwick Mihaly