2025 Year in Review

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Okay look I know it’s March but I’d rather post this late than not at all.

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2025 was a hell of a year, I’ll say that much. Between being sick, leaving a stressful job for a better one, and trying to keep my art afloat, I feel like I’ve been completely tied up. I also feel like I haven’t made a lot of progress, which I’ve been told is a common feeling around this time post-new year. In the spirit of looking on the bright side, I’ve decided to make a small compilation blog reviewing what I’ve accomplished.

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For starters, let’s look at the blog! My goal for 2025 was to write a total of 12 blog posts over the year, ideally one a month. I didn’t reach my goal, but I did manage to post a total of 8 blogs throughout the year. That’s definitely the most productive year to date!

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2025’s blogs in reverse chronological order are:

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Exploring Levantine Paganism: A Primer

The Enduring Wonders of the Uffington White Horse

Creating a Sacred Chipmunk Skull Reliquary

Exploring Hopeful Memes: Inspiration for Self-Reflection

The Best Online Museum Collections for Art Inspiration and Research Outside of Pinterest

What to do When Your Spiritual Practice Collects Dust

Being a Spiritual Artist

Artifacts as Primary Sources for Studying Material Culture

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When it comes to views, the blog is actually starting to pick up a little! I had a total of 707 views and 484 individual visitors during 2025. I also logged a total of 15 likes! These numbers may still be rather small, but I’ve been working hard for them and want to celebrate that.

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Shelby the Cattle Dog by bogprism. Made with gouache, colored pencil, and acrylics.

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When it comes to views, the blog is actually starting to pick up a little! I had a total of 707 views and 484 individual visitors during 2025. I also logged a total of 15 likes! These numbers may still be rather small, but I’ve been working hard for them and want to celebrate that.

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The most viewed page was my Homepage, with 206 views. After that, it’s the Online Museum Collections Outside of Pinterest blog, with 141 total views. With 50 distinct views, the Artifacts as Primary Sources blog takes third. My portfolio isn’t as high up on the list as I’d like it to be, but that’s just another reason to keep trying to advertise my art and writing! This year. my Portfolio got a total of 42 views.

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The next stats to go over are the numbers for the “referrers”, which is really just showing how people found my blog. A majority of the views (60) came from various search engines. Someone shared one of my blog posts on a website called MetaFilter, and the traffic I got from it was impressive! In total, 56 of the blog’s views came from MetaFilter. The next smallest number comes from Facebook. I spent some time this year advertising my blog/website on Facebook, and it earned me a cool 19 views. The remaining sources are fairly small in their view counts, so I’m going to leave those out.

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WordPress also tracks the country people are accessing the site from. 379 views came from the US, which unsurprisingly took first. That said, 63 views came from the United Kingdom, and 31 from Germany. 26 viewers connected from Canada, and 19 from Australia.

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The next smallest numbers tend to hover around 12 views, so I’m not going to go into each individually. That said, there were also a few countries I hadn’t expected to see. It was interesting watching for new countries every time I checked my stats this year. Some of those other countries include: Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon, Cambodia, and the Netherlands.

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I’m still holding out for a single comment, which is a goal I’m trying to reach this year. Ideally I would love to engage with people in the blog comments and get some good discussion going!

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The last two stats I have to share with you are sort of miscellaneous, so I’m sticking them together here.

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First, 59% of visitors were on desktop, and 40% on mobile. A small 2% viewed the site from a tablet. Second, I had a total of 23 downloads of my academic midterm paper I wrote and connected to the blog on The Allat-Athena of Palmyra. I’ll be honest, this one shocked me the most out of anything. I really didn’t expect people to want to read it, and I sort of threw it in the post as an afterthought. I might have to consider summarizing and attaching academic papers I wrote, now.

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Now that all the dry stats and analytics are through, I’m going to move on to personal reflection.

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My personal favorite blog post in 2025 is probably Exploring Hopeful Memes: Inspiration for Self-Reflection. It’s definitely not my most popular blog and it’s a little short, but I just genuinely had a lot of fun writing it. Second place would probably be Creating a Sacred Chipmunk Skull Reliquary. I don’t think I have a least favorite post, but the one that I struggled with the most was probably The Enduring Wonders of the Uffington White Horse. I decided to write that one in a single session, and I definitely shouldn’t have. That said, I am rather proud of how it came out.

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During 2025, I really felt like I was starting to gain some momentum with my blog. My posting may still be random, but I’m finding myself going and working on blog posts more and more lately. I also feel like I’m starting to better discover my personal design language and blog formatting. Alongside that, I fixed some design issues on the main website, and overall made things easier to navigate.

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Princess Tiabeanie by bogprism. Gouache, colored pencils, and acrylic paint

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Oh! I almost forgot one of my favorite bogprism updates! The Pet Portraits portfolio page got a total overhaul. Visuals got ironed out, branding got added, and I learned some fun WordPress features like creating a link that jumps to a specific part of a page. So far I’ve only used that on the aforementioned page, but I think it’ll end up coming in handy.

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Overall, I’m incredibly proud of everything that I managed to accomplish in 2025. It definitely wasn’t my best year for a lot of reasons, but I kept with the blog and didn’t ever give up on it. Knowing that actually makes me hopeful for 2026 because if I did so much on a bad year, I should be able to do even more on a good year!

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And I do think that this year is going to be a lot better for me. I spent 2025 learning things about myself and how to better manage my brain, and I feel like some things have finally started to click. The progress is tangible now, which I love.

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I’m not fully sure on how I want to end this blog, so I’ll leave you with a simple blessing:

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I hope that 2025 treated you well, and 2026 treats you better!

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