For quite some time now, I've had this brilliant idea to put up a page with the most popular blog posts. Finally, I did just that, and made an interesting discovery: this blog peaked in 2004-2006. That's right, friends, over the last 6 years, you've been witnessing (or not, since readership is also way down) the decline of this here web site.

While that's a little bit sad, it's also understandable. As the number of blog posts has declined, so have the number of visitors, and therefore comments. And this has all happened as I've gotten busier. So I don't actually feel bad about it, just curious to see where, if anywhere, this blog will go in the future. I'm not ready to give it up, though I've contemplated that over the last couple of years.

Anyhow, the new page is here, and you can also get to it from the links on the right. Enjoy your walk down memory lane; I know I did!

While doing all this, I got curious about the numbers of posts and comments on this blog over the years. For those of you who love statistics (who doesn't?), I've included those numbers here. Note that the blog posts before July of 2005 were hand-coded, so I couldn't easily get the numbers on those. And prior to 2003, there were no comments.

Year    # of posts      # of comments
2003                    557
2004                    967
2005	55              733
2006	116             614
2007	73              291
2008	43              135
2009	46              114
2010	34              70
2011	26              46
2012	14              14

I think we can all agree that my blogging activity for 2012 was pretty pathetic. I bet I can do better than that in 2013, but only because a) it's such a low bar, and b) this is already the 3rd post of the year. I'm already 1/5 of the way there!