Happy birthday! No, not my birthday exactly, though coincidentally, that’s not far off.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

— George Santayana

It was a year ago today that I said “hello world” in this space, Tim did me the favor of sharing his google karma by outing me, and this blog went public.

In the past year, I’ve written 204 essays that have been served 185,681 times. All tolled more than 30 gigabytes of data have been hurled through the ’net from here. Continuing with the statistical theme, the most popular essays have been:

Table 1. Most Popular Essays
EssayHits
XML Is Not Object Oriented 4024
Summer Flowers! 3882
Pub Signs 3076
More Ruminations on DocBook 2846
Escaped Markup: Still Harmful 2803
XML 2003 2758
IE Oddness 2327
Escaped Markup: What To Do Instead 2299
On Atom and Postel’s Law 2291
Taking a Hard Line 2272

It’s an interesting mix of essays. Some, like the series on escaped markup (evil! evil! evil!) are controversial and must be well linked; others, like flowers and pub signs, are just popular search targets.

Looking back, I think it’s been a delightful success. Something, certainly, that I intend to keep on doing.

See you next year, and roughly 200 times before then!

Comments:

Isn't it odd that the Google Ads for this page all point to essay-producing companies? As a scientist (almost!) I think that's funny.

Posted by Jim Cerra on 05 Jun 2004 @ 07:17pm UTC #
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