Favorites, top posts, & other blog technicalities

This picture ganked from Pahlish as explained below:

I'm not really picking a top polish of last year, because I'm not organized enough to do that, but I was thinking that if I were going to, it would be this glitter - Yuletide Treasure. (I was intending to just link to Pahlish's website but it's not there any more! so I had to go pull it off of Pinterest instead.) This was her December duo - apparently she does one every month. January is also already sold out but it's still there to look at. (It's Doctor Who themed, and I would totally buy it if it was still available. But I say that about every Dr-Who related polish that comes along - and there are a lot of them, because nail fanatics and girl geeks seem to have a lot of overlap.)

My (typically bad) picture of a mani using this polish is under the jump - frankly, in this case, it's WHY it's under the jump!

Incidentally, the reason I'm saying I'm not picking favorites, even if I promptly picked one anyway, is because I haven't gone through and looked at what else I wore and loved this past year. This is certainly my most recent favorite, but I haven't checked for other contenders from back before that one. (On the other hand, things I've worn since then include extremely popular Liquid Sands and Pixie Dusts, so it's not easy competition, even if we just look at the last month or so!)

So here's the picture that goes with the entry that has my all-time highest page-views (still not very high, but high by my standards):

I love the mani, so I hope that this got lots of clicks because of that, or else because people were dying to know what I got for Christmas, and NOT because people wanted to point and laugh at my ragged cuticles and tip-wear in this picture. It makes me terribly self-conscious to look at it - although not enough, you notice, that I refused to repeat it here. If I had another picture of that manicure, I would use it instead, though, because I've never had another picture where my cuticles looked this bad that I can think of! As I said at the time, they didn't actually look bad at all in person. I may start moisturizing my cuticles before I take pictures just in case, in the future.

(Note that there is also a picture here using the same glitter and trying for same gradient effect, but with the green from the Pahlish duo instead of the gold China Glaze I used above. I do think I did a better job of achieving an actual gradient on the second try, which is the gold one.)

A close second on page-views was the fuchsia nail-wheel even though it didn't even have a picture of the full nail wheel at first, just the polishes with glimpses of the wheel. I have a theory, though, that people like to look at other people's polishes. I noticed it with the stash pictures that I did earlier in the year last year, too. (If I didn't think people seemed to like to look at them, I wouldn't be putting up another set so soon; I would just rearrange and not take pictures!) It probably also helps that a lot of people love bright pinks. I generally do myself - which is why I have so many, although I've been kind of avoiding them lately. I guess I overindulged.


I was reading nail blogs on Bloglovin' - I have all the nail blogs in a group, and you get kind of a different point of view if you look at them as a group, which is what I've been doing lately. (I used to read one blog at a time, but it seemed like I never got close to catching up. If I look at all of them at once I can scroll down to the bottom and read oldest-first.) I don't say you don't see trends looking at them individually (whether on Bloglovin' or whatever other way you access your favorites) because of course you still do, but looking at them in strict chronological order makes it really obvious when everybody posts similar things around the same time (like most-popular posts, which is why I'm talking about this in the first place).

Also, if you're wondering - because I would be wondering if I was reading somebody else writing about this stuff! - I click through and read the most interesting-looking ones on their own blog. (I don't think they give you an option for reading the whole thing there, do they? although I know other feed-readers I've used did.) Others I just put "mark as read" because it's a big list and I just don't have time to read every single entry. If it has a good picture I might also hit "like" but usually if the picture is that interesting I have already clicked through anyway. So I don't know how much use the "like" feature on Bloglovin' is. Do other people use it differently? Do you look at your stats? (I haven't so far but probably will eventually. I say it doesn't matter to me, and it's true that I don't do things in order to draw a lot of traffic - which certainly shows in my page-views! - but still, I do like to know somebody is reading! I do know that my page-views as measured by Blogspot have gone up a LOT recently, and I figure that Bloglovin' deserves at least part of the credit there. It seems to me that it was about the time that I put that "follow me" button at the top of my sidebar that my stats went up.)

I do want more comments, and so if I have a blog-related resolution for 2014, I guess it should be to go out and comment more myself!

(I still don't much like the name "bloglovin'" too much. I've always been iffy about the word "blog" in the first place, because I think it's an ugly word - actually I imagine I dislike it partly for the same reason I dislike "blurple," since they start with similar sounds. And then also I think "lovin'" is kind of excessively cutesy. But eh, it's honestly not something I think about it much. I click on the button without paying much attention to the name - it's just my preferred feedreader. It's only when I have to actually type out the name that I feel the need to rant about it!)