Since we moved over to WordPress.com in March I have seen a distinct growth in our readership so Narutaki and I thought you might be interested to see how the site has grown as well. As always what is popular on the site still remains a mystery to me and might very well do so for all time. I hope to see more growth on the site and hope that you, our readers, continue to provide us feedback so we can best serve your needs while writing what we want to write with passion and energy.

I had no idea WP did this round-up thing, but I figured why not post it. We’ve seen great growth since moving over to the official WP site and I’m happy to see by their standards we are in a “wow” category, who would have thought! The stat about picture uploads can be ignored since we use our Photobucket for most things. I’m pretty happy to see Gosick as one of the top search terms as well as our own name. Anyhow, just a little post to let our readers see some stats!

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

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As always the year just seems to fly by once the holidays hit. There have been big changes in 2010 for Reverse Thieves, but know that we always have more ideas up our sleeves. We’ve started a couple of new article series, but really expect them to take flight over 2011. No Case Too Small is an attempt to bring more detective related material to the blog. While technically we are just detective-themed, we do indeed love mystery series and want to bring more of that coverage than ever before. Our Otaku NYC pieces are just a fun bunch of articles aimed at anyone coming to the area or even those who live here. Hopefully we will alert people to well-known places but also a few surprises now and again, expect to see stores and food among other things talked about. Also, we are also jumping into the fray, we are trying an episodic review of the upcoming winter show Gosick. And finally, the revival of Manga of the Month begins in January! Since we are posting more solo articles, Final Denouement is taking an extended vacation. 2011 is going to be another big year for Reverse Thieves!

We are also making some big changes to the Speakeasy podcast as well. First and foremost is that for our 1 year anniversary I decided to upgrade to some real recording equipment. Up until now we had been using the most generic and basic Logitech USB desktop microphone with no other audio equipment. I upgraded our microphone to a Blue Yeti microphone and got a Belkin TuneStudio portable digital multitrack recorder mixer. I don’t know how much of a difference this equipment will improve our audio quality but I am making steps towards improvement. The mixer is portable so we might start doing live podcasts from conventions as well. If all goes well I might get a compressor down the line, too. We are also looking into bringing on guests to the show. Narutaki and I wanted to run the podcast for at least a year without guests to set a tone for the podcast. But if you have any guests you would like to see on the podcast or would like to be a guest yourself just leave a comment and we will see what we can do. Other than that we are always open to suggestions and feedback about the website and the podcast. We hope to entertain and inform our fellow anime and manga fans next year even more than ever.