What Is Popular On Cedar's Mountain?

Over the years, I've got to wondering about the aftereffects of the three pronged giant imprint that I left all over the Cyber World with my blog. By imprint, I mean the various leftover blog links on posts and in my semi-dead profiles in the chat rooms, my profile links throughout my journeys in the blog world, and the blog feed that I have on Facebook. By aftereffects, I mean what kind of blog posts were people reading when they happened to stop by for a visit.

I really wanted to find out what people were reading here, so after reading a post about Google Analytics that a fellow blogger wrote about positively, I checked it out. And just as quick, I dropped the idea. Why? Because I'm not that computer savvy when it comes to editing code in a template, I was deathly afraid of screwing up my template while trying to figure out how to properly insert the code that was required to use Google Analytics.

Fast forward to last year.

Among the many bells and whistles that Blogger rolled out, was the tab called "Stats". "Stats" in my opinion was the best thing Blogger could come up with to replace the Google Analytics that people like me, who wanted to know what people were reading on their blog, were deathly afraid of screwing up the html code for their blog while trying to make Google Analytics work.

And because of this "Stats" tab, for the first time in about a year (ever since I added those "About Pages" to my blog) I was able to add a gadget that showed the top posts on my blog. I narrowed down the choices to the top four for the current month and called it "The Four Season's Of Popularity".

But wait, there's more. I like that particular gadget so much that I decided to write a post showcasing what Cedar's Mountain's top ten popular posts for last year (or rather, May '10 thru mid Jan'11) were. Feel free to explore the links in question and I hope you have enjoyable trip down memory lane.

10} Newington Center....And Beyond (3): Apparently the only reason why this is in my top ten, is because it contains the picture of a cat sitting on a couch with a bottle of beer and the t.v. remote.

9} Thou Are A Hypocrite: This was one of the few nationally oriented political posts I wrote, which basically pointed out how hypocritical the national media was when it came to the Tea Party movement and the current party occupying the White House.

8} Tete-Tete-Tete: A three part post about Shooting Suburbia, "Don't Ask Don't Tell", and my musical choices when I did a monster two day edit of my book Line 21.

7} Book Review Of A Short Story Anthology by Charles Gramlich: Need I say more? Charles was thoughtful enough to feature a link to this post from his blog, and the end result was that it became #7 on my list.

6} Pics, Familia And Facebook: A two part post about Shooting Suburbia and a pitch for more Facebook friends, which also included a sample status update about my daughter.

5} Pictorial Post: Apparently a 55 word post is all the rage in blog land.

4} Damn! I Done Got Banned From A Fan Page!: In the summer of 2010 a local radio station (WCCC 106.9FM) made a ton of wholesale personnel changes which culminated in a lot of vitriol from the listening public. I was a fan of their Facebook page until things came to a head in September.

3} Life Is Tough, But It's Tougher If You're Stupid: This is one of my most popular e-mail based posts.

2} Won't You Please Paint Me With The Widest Brush You Got?: This is a rant mainly about when people launch unprovoked attacks on others who have the temerity to disagree with a generally accepted left-leaning opinion that is prevalent in the academic world.

And finally, 1} All Points Bulletin: The main reason as to why I believe that this post is numero uno on the hit parade (236 page views), is because the title actually follows one of the guiding principles of the blog world, which is to have a title that contains key search words and/or phrases. I guess people come to here expecting something about an online computer game called "All Points Bulletin", because they certainly ain't coming here for the content of this Valentine Day oriented post, which by the way, contains one of the best pieces of flash (a shade over 300 words) that I've ever written on the fly.