On Pace for 1 Million!

Earlier in the month, I couldn't help but notice that this little blog is gaining on a milestone I never thought could be reached.  After 3½ years of posts, the pageviews count is bearing down on the 1,000,000 marker.  As that moment nears, I thought I'd touch on some of the posts that have helped Tactical Tag get to where it is today.

Where did things initially take off for Tactical Tag?  Well, it's easy to see the spike in attention if you look around August of 2011.  I had only been writing with the blog for a few months, but there was plenty of early exposure thanks to a few links Pocket Esq had linked to Urban Taggers, a popular Australian-based blog. He had great resources on the Nerf News side of things (maybe a little TOO great) but for Laser Tag news, I was pretty much his lone contributor.  Pocket is still one of the only major bloggers I've worked with who had an interest in Laser Tag, so it was always fun talking with him about that stuff.  He took great interest in my reshelling projects like the LTX DMR and LTX EF5.  Without that support early on, there wouldn't have been much to build off of.  I owe much of this blog's early success to the support he gave.

After that, the next big spike came in the form of Nerf News... which I am almost never a source of.  Thanks to a friend of mine who was meticulously keeping an eye on ToyFair 2012 for news of the Lazer Tag Augmented Reality system (LTAR).  Among the images in a slideshow, there was a Vortex Blaster that popped up that I hadn't seen before.  Somehow, by looking for Laser Tag news, Tactical Tag managed to get famous for being the first to spread the word about the Vortex Pyragon.  Even after over two years of this post, it's still actually in the Top 10 for pageviews on this blog.

As the N-Strike Elite lineup was getting ready to hit shelves for the first time in 2012, I finished a project that would cause quite a stir in the Nerf community.  The "Elite Longshot", which is confused to-this-day as a real Hasbro product, was finished in time for it's first matchup against the then-new Retaliator.  The 75 foot range claims that the Elite series was boasting would be put to the test against an Elite-painted Longshot that I had designed to look and perform like the rumors were telling us.  I ended up building a second one earlier this year, but there's still plenty of misinformed YouBook and FaceTube fans who cry out at this false hope of a blaster.  Not exactly the best press!

In going with the "fooled you" concept of gaining internet fame, Tactical Tag's current pageview champion is the 2014 April Fools joke about the Rhino-Fire.  It was just a cleaned-up version of a mashup of blasters by Buster, as you can make out pieces of other MEGA blasters in this Franken-Fooler.  I am still baffled at how many people this managed to truly fool, as I didn't think it would get nearly as much attention as that Nerf Nuke that ThinkGeek showcased that day... and it probably didn't.  Still this Slam-Fire Flywheel-Driven MEGA Dart Blaster has reeled in over 5,000 of Tactical Tag's pageviews.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, it's never really just been one or two posts that have brought Tactical Tag this far.  There are currently 870 posts that have been made since the blog was started that span 44 months.  So, as the New Year closes in and those pageviews steadily climb, I just thought I'd take a look back at the progress this blog has made so far.  It's still admittedly a little blog compared to some.  There's no sponsorship, no official endorsement, no fancy web designer or custom domain name.  Just a blog about stuff I like.  I've picked up some readers who have turned into great friends, so it's been a rewarding run so far!