It's time for the annual round up of what happened last year, and a look at plans for the year ahead. In summary:
- 2022
- Gwulo's big news in 2022 was finishing the website upgrade. It took a lot longer than I expected, but it means the site is now in good shape to keep running safely for several more years.
- Thank you as always to all the patrons who support the costs of running Gwulo, and to all the contributors who have added to Gwulo's record of old Hong Kong during 2022.
- Gwulo's big news in 2022 was finishing the website upgrade. It took a lot longer than I expected, but it means the site is now in good shape to keep running safely for several more years.
- 2023
- I'm excited to be taking part in this year's Hong Kong International Literary Festival, leading a guided walk on 9 March and giving an illustrated talk on 11 March. I hope to see you there - please keep the dates free and I'll let you know once tickets go on sale.
- Volume 5 of my books will be published this year.
- There won't be any major changes to the website's structure this year, though I'll need to keep working on some remaining bugs, and the regular maintenance still has to be done.
- I'll be posting to the website about old photos and their stories, and curiosities found while out and about. I hope you will too!
- I'm excited to be taking part in this year's Hong Kong International Literary Festival, leading a guided walk on 9 March and giving an illustrated talk on 11 March. I hope to see you there - please keep the dates free and I'll let you know once tickets go on sale.
In more detail ....
1. The Gwulo Website
1. 1 Website features
This website is built on the Drupal open-source Content Management System. We were previously using version 7 of Drupal, which is coming to the end of its life (it will stop receiving security updates so the site would become vulnerable to attacks by hackers). With the upgrade complete we're now using the current version of Drupal, which will continue to be updated and keep us safe for years to come.
I don't plan any major new features for the site this year. Frankly the upgrade took a lot more work than I expected, so I'm ready for a break from coding and to get back to writing about history. I did have one bright idea for a new feature though, a way to make guided walks easier. We'll see if I get tempted to work on that...
Though I don't plan to add new features via coding, I'd like to add an introduction page for new visitors to the site. It isn't immediately obvious what's available on Gwulo, so some signposts to interesting content and a guide to finding things will be a useful addition.
1.2 Website content
Gwulo passed a major milestone during 2022: the site now has over 50,000 pages!
You can see the detailed figures at the bottom of this page, but it's good to see that despite the interruptions caused by the upgrade, the site continues to grow.
Here are the most popular pages created during the year:
2. Patrons, contributors, and readers
2.1 Patrons
Thank you to all of Gwulo's patrons, who make a monthly or annual contribution towards the costs of running the website (both time spent and out-of-pocket expenses).
You'll see that the number of patrons has dropped this year. If you receive value from the Gwulo website and newsletters, please consider becoming a patron.
| 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | |
| Number of patrons | 45 | 59 | 61 | 51 | 53 | 55 | 54 |
| Total HK$ monthly contribution | 2,425 | 3,169 | 3,557 | 3,047 | 2,545 | 2,425 | 2,440 |
2.2 Contributors
Here are Gwulo's most prolific contributors in 2022:
| Contributor | Pages | Photos | Comments | Total |
| simtang | 23 | 467 | 164 | 654 |
| Admin | 179 | 135 | 294 | 608 |
| Klaus | 64 | 207 | 141 | 412 |
| moddsey | 45 | 164 | 130 | 339 |
| eurasian_david | 39 | 58 | 202 | 299 |
| annpake | 295 | 295 | ||
| Dibsy | 1 | 126 | 127 | |
| tngan | 7 | 55 | 53 | 115 |
| jill | 21 | 20 | 65 | 106 |
| HK Bill | 93 | 93 | ||
| Show all | Show all | Show all |
Thank you to all of Gwulo's contributors, including volunteers annhw, Grace, joybot, patricia, strickja, and wingcli2015 for their good work in typing up the Jurors Lists.
If you have any knowledge or old maps / photos / documents about old Hong Kong you can share with Gwulo's readers, it will be very gratefully received. Please leave a comment below if you need any help with how best to add it to the website.
2.3 Readers
2.3.1 Website readers
According to Google's figures, the number of people visiting Gwulo dropped from 1.5 million in 2021 to 882,000 in 2023. It isn't as scary as it first looks though, as the numbers dropped dramatically in August then stayed low. I believe that Google records visits to the upgraded website differently from the old version, which is why the numbers changed so much.
There were 1.9 million page views in 2022, vs 2.5 million page views in 2021, or roughly a 25% drop. I don't see any sudden drop in these figures for August, so I think it is a fair comparison.
I guess that part of the reason for the drop was the upgrade, which meant less new content in the newsletters. If I look at the number of page views each month, they decrease from January to July, then after the upgraded site went live the number rises again towards the end of the year. Also, there's just a lot more information about Hong Kong history available online than there used to be, so I expect that explains some of the drop as readers visit other sources. I guess we'll see the number of page views increase again in 2023, but probably not back to the 2021's 2.5 million.
I don't worry about it: the numbers of visitors and page views will go up and down, but as long as we're adding interesting content to the site I'll continue to enjoy it.
2.3.2 E-mail subscribers
That is working well. At the end of the year the weekly email newsletter went out to around 4,800 people. About half of them open it, but many also forward copies to friends, so we end up with around 4,000 opens in total for a typical newsletter.
The latest cycle of the wartime diaries, 81 years ago, is also off to a strong start, with over 180 subscribers. This is more of a niche interest, but across all cycles over 800 copies of the daily wartime diaries emails are sent out each morning to readers around the world.
2.3.3 Social Media
I post occasionally to Gwulo's accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. Usually I'm posting short versions of the latest newsletter, with a link back to Gwulo for the main text. I post there because I know some readers prefer to get their news via their social media account instead of via email. The problem is that the social media algorithms mean my messages often don't reach them - Facebook is especially bad at that. So if you check your e-mail regularly I recommend subscribing to Gwulo's e-mail newsletter as the best way to stay in touch. (Though even the emails can get lost in spam filters from time to time, so if you're looking for a guaranteed way to stay in touch then linking to our RSS feed is best of all.)
3. Walks, talks, books, and the press
3.1 Walks and talks
Last year my automatic response to requests for any walks or talks was: 'Sorry, I'm keeping my head down until the upgrade is finished'. With that done, it's good to get out again.
I finished 2022 with two very different talks. In October it was a short talk to over 150 people, acting as the warm-up for the main speaker at the RGS Gala Dinner. (You can watch a recording of the talk on Youtube: "How WW2 changed Hong Kong".) Then at the end of December it was a longer talk to a smaller audience at the Lion's Ink Bookstore, talking about some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into finding and preparing the photos I've used in my book.
This year, as mentioned above, I'm looking forward to taking part in the Hong Kong International Literary festival. On Thursday 9 March I'll be leading a walk around San Po Kong, talking about its history and showing old maps and photos of the area. Then on Saturday 11 March I'm giving an illustrated talk. It'll be a Greatest Hits version of my usual talks, as I'm choosing my favourite photos and stories from Volumes 1-4, and giving a preview of some of the photos that will go into the new Volume 5.
In late April I'll give a talk to the Royal Asiatic Society in Hong Kong, date to be confirmed.
3.2 Books
In 2022 we sold the 6,000th copy of Gwulo's books, Old Hong Kong and The Tales They Tell, Volumes 1-4 . I was running out of stock of Volume 1 again, so it was time for another reprint. I used the reprint as an opportunity to use new Artificial Intelligence software to sharpen up some of the images - here are some examples.
This year's job is to publish Volume 5. I'll be concentrating on photos from my collection that show the variety of people in old Hong Kong.
3,3 Gwulo in the press
I met Rubin Verebes for a very enjoyable interview about all things Gwulo. The interview was published in June 2022 on the BEAT hong kong website.
A few days ago I had an interview with one of the local newspapers, so I hope we'll see that published in the next few weeks.
While we're looking back at Gwulo's past, I noticed recently that we're approaching the 21st birthday of Batgung.com, the web site that eventually led to me starting Gwulo.com.
Enough with the navel-gazing, and thank you for reading this far! Next week I'll be writing about a 100+ year-old pier I recently found hidden in plain sight. It played an important role in the fighting in WW2, so it has an interesting story to tell.
Regards, David
2022 in numbers
Visitors to the website:
| Website traffic (thousands) | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 |
| Visitors | 966 | 1,602 | 890 | 420 | 400 | 317 | 253 | 230 | 226 | 263 | 250 | 200 | 157 |
| Unique visitors | 882 | 1,516 | 732 | 267 | 245 | 191 | 148 | 138 | 131 | 155 | 150 | 113 | 88 |
| Pageviews | 1,912 | 2,552 | 2,640 | 2,077 | 1,996 | 1,647 | 1,292 | 1,184 | 1,186 | 1,351 | 1,149 | 919 | 872 |
(I think Google changed their way of recording the number of visitors in 2020, and again in 2022, explaining the sudden jump then drop in the number of visitors in those years.)
Subscribers / Followers:
| Newsletter Subscribers | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 |
| 4,853 | 4,695 | 3,939 | 3,240 | 2,737 | 2,067 | 1,466 | 1,211 | 1,030 | 833 | 603 | 353 | 180 | |
| 6,500 | 6,100 | 5,043 | 3,487 | 3,060 | 2,344 | 1,849 | 1,629 | 965 | 705 | 463 | 273 | ||
| 790 | 700 | 606 | 282 | 229 | 153 | 114 | 100 | 82 | 58 | 43 | 33 | ||
| 3,100 | |||||||||||||
| 871 | |||||||||||||
| RSS subscriptions [1] | 48 | 81 | 31 | 82 | 53 | ||||||||
| Total | 16,114 | 11,495 | 9,588 | 7,009 | 6,026 | 4,564 | 3,420 | 2,988 | 2,158 | 1,627 | 1,191 | 712 | 180 |
| Wartime Diaries subscribers | |||||||||||||
| 81 years ago | 182 | ||||||||||||
| 80 years ago | 143 | 133 | |||||||||||
| 79 years ago | 158 | 160 | 110 | ||||||||||
| 78 years ago | 160 | 156 | 117 | 74 | |||||||||
| 77 years ago | 227 | 156 | 125 | 112 | 56 | ||||||||
| 76 years ago [2] | 228 | 219 | 165 | 167 | 108 | ||||||||
| 75 years ago [2] | 209 | 183 | 148 | 141 | 86 | ||||||||
| 74 years ago [2] | 199 | 156 | 144 | 109 | 79 | ||||||||
| 73 years ago [2] | 138 | 131 | 108 | 91 | 100 | ||||||||
| 72 years ago [2] | 143 | 115 | 89 | 97 | 109 | ||||||||
| 71 years ago [2] | 139 | 85 | 88 | 88 | 81 | ||||||||
| 70 years ago [2] | 94 | 42 | 44 | 37 | |||||||||
| Total [3] | 870 | 833 | 780 | 733 | 665 | 667 | 557 | 438 | 327 | 241 | 118 |
Notes:
[1]. Since switching from Feedburner to MailChimp, we have no way to monitor the number of RSS subscriptions.
[2]. These diary cycles had already finished, so I don't count their subscribers this year.
[3].Some people subscribe to more than one year's Wartime Diaries, so the total number of individuals subscribing will be lower..
Website content:
| 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | |
| Photos | 31,983 | 29,803 | 27,477 | 23,305 | 19,870 | 17,740 | 15,508 | 11,670 | 9,401 | 7,817 | 6,359 | 5,725 | 4,330 |
| Places | 6,141 | 5,901 | 5,628 | 5,029 | 4,570 | 4,290 | 3,770 | 3,140 | 2,867 | 2,440 | 2,035 | 1,623 | 1,310 |
| Diary pages | 5,393 | 5,258 | 5,051 | 4,973 | 4,690 | 4,630 | 4,373 | 3,836 | 3,243 | 2,326 | 1,589 | ||
| People | 3,813 | 3,661 | 3,458 | 3,281 | 3,120 | 2,900 | 2,696 | 2,425 | 1,907 | 1,522 | 1,000 | 28 | |
| Forum topics | 2,134 | 2,014 | 1,853 | 1,621 | 1,460 | 1,310 | 1,159 | 1,019 | 923 | 761 | 639 | 525 | 350 |
| Stories | 577 | 564 | 548 | 505 | 480 | 430 | 405 | 341 | 312 | 265 | 243 | 213 | 170 |
| Streets | 50 | 44 | 37 | 20 | |||||||||
| Total pages | 50,091 | 47,245 | 44,052 | 38,734 | 34,190 | 31,300 | 27,911 | 22,431 | 18,653 | 15,131 | 11,865 | 8,114 | 6,160 |
| Total comments | 54,007 | 53,689 | 49,580 | 43,690 | 38,840 | 35,320 | 31,861 | 27,620 | 24,097 | 20,883 | 17,477 | 14,910 | 11,370 |
| Jurors Lists (years) | 62 | 58 | 55 | 48 | 43 | 38 | 35 | 33 | 31 | 29 | 27 | 19 | 11 |
Number of people adding pages, photos, & comments to the website during the year:
| 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | |
| People adding pages | 93 | 287 | 272 | 215 |
| People adding photos | 137 | |||
| People adding comments | 299 | 582 | 549 | 413 |
(From 2022 on, photos are counted separately from other pages.)