Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Ten years of the RaHN blog and a Merry Mayday to all our readers

It' a bit over ten years since the first item on this blog was posted, a meeting notice like many of the early ones: (Posted Sunday, March 29, 2009) The Ideas and Life of Thomas Spence. As titles of meetings and blogposts indicate, the group was and is concerned not only with local history, although ties in north-east London remain strong, but with all types of radical history. The Radical History Network of North-East London (RaHN) had been going for about 3 years already when the blog was started, and continued to hold regular meetings for a further three, then, after the death of founder member and organiser-in-chief Alan Woodward, rather less regular ones.

Nowadays the 'network' function is key, with the blog adding to the exchange of information and spread of ideas among more-or-less likeminded people that goes on via our mailing list (email us to sign up.) At the same time, many members are active in their various situations, communities and campaigns, and  may be encountered, armed with quantities of fascinating free printed matter, on the RaHN stall at events like the annual Haringey Local History Fare.

An overview of  the group's first ten ywars was posted in February 2016:  Part 1 and Part 2
At that time, with well over 100,000 page-view "hits" chalked up by early 2016, the top five most popular blogposts, after the multi-item 'Spain and the World' set (Preface 15/6/11), appeared to be: 
The London Workers Group [1977-1985] (29-10-09)
McDonald's and McLibel [1985-2005] (13-9-09)
Great Enoch (Luddites, Machine Breaking...) (28-5-11)
FINSBURY PARK - a history of community empowerment (10-7-13)
ALAN WOODWARD 1939-2012 (21-10-12)the 

At present (end of April 2019) we have some different contenders, but this is looking at 'All time'  page rather than each post's recorded page-views** as such (they don't seem to match) so the comparison is not direct (and as pointed out before, more recent posts* have obviously not had so much time to build up their total):
For example, if Christopher Draper's 'Walsall Anarchists' and related posts were considered as a set, they would surely be up there with the best - and the latest got to 500+ in a fortnight.

1652
May 15, 2016, 4 comments
1204
1063
993
982
While noting that the statistics may be skewed by attempts at hacking or phishing, random tweets or who knows what, it seems safe enough to say that the all-time total of pageviews has gone up satisfactorily (given as getting on for 230,000) and a respectable monthly average for this kind of thing (currently about 1600 overall) is being maintained.
**Update: After trawling 18 pages of listed posts for actual pageviews over 1,000 counted, the following emerge as the Top 12 (short title/keyword) - not counting a weird surge that gave us extra thousands, mostly from Russia, around the end of 2016 (i.e.shortly after the US Presidential election -who knows what was going on there?)
Women in Sp.Rev.  2330
Great Enoch          2207
Spain & World (6)  1986
London Workers G. 1712
FINSBURY PARK  1535
McDonald's & McL 1381
ALAN WOODWARD 1303 
MEETING Span. Rev. 1123
Spain & World (7)       1108
Spies for Peace/RSGs  1104
INVERGORDON Review  1091
and Remembering the Real WW1  960 
Pageviews last month
1,636
Pageviews all time history
229,127
Followers
Our 'audience' is of course international. 
Top ten source countries of viewers, above caveat applies: 
EntryPageviews
United States
78909
United Kingdom
38556
Russia
37400
Germany
12856
France
9812
Ukraine
6641
Italy
4437
China
2235
Netherlands
1126
Poland
1106
Click link on right of blog page to see the current leaflet
As ever, the blog editor would be happy to receive contributions on relevant topics - broadly libertarian socialist perspective on historical events and characters, social movements, current activism -  and in whatever format - articles, reviews, listings, reportage - as well as comments on any of the 440 previous posts. We have nearly 200 comments already, the majority admittedly by the blogger but often with input from correspondents via radicalhistorynetwork@gmail.com.

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