Terrible Twos

On Oct. 1 Ascent Stage turned two. True to form the blog is behaving like a toddler: less predictable, more prone to outbursts, and frankly stinkier.

But let’s have a look at this objectively.

Since inception there have been 458 posts, but only 142 posts in its second year. Way behind year one pace. In fact, I’d have to exceed the number of posts year-to-date in the last two months of this year to equal last year.

There have been 303 comments to date. The most commented posts almost perfectly correspond to the most viewed pages (which makes sense). Here are the top three most visited pages:

How To Build a Lego Mosaic
Ascent Stage Home Page
Tonsiloliths

These three pages account for almost two-thirds of all content views. Even more striking is that the two actual posts minus the home page account for 44% of all site traffic. That’s kinda depressing. Almost half of traffic for two lousy posts? Clearly Howto’s and obscure medical phenomema are key to Google-derived traffic nirvana.

Rounding out the top ten, but far, far distant from the top three are:

The Genographic Project
The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time
Outlook Detox
The topic category Science/Tech
Nike plus iPod minus Nike
The topic category Music
Deprivation and Focus

Most of the top posts came from this year. Quality not quantity, baby. Strangely missing from the top ten is Satisfying Inconvenience, the most commented-on post ever.

I’ve posted 865 marginalia links on del.icio.us since inception. That, at least, exceeds one a day.

Browser stats:
Internet Explorer: 57%
Firefox: 34%
Safari: 7%

The IE numbers are dead on for the Internet average while Firefox is slightly higher than the norm. I guess I’ve pissed off Opera users somewhere along the way.

And the platform breakdown:
Windows: 85%
Mac: 14%
Linux: <1% That's about 10% higher for Mac users than the Internet norm. Does this mean I'm cool? Happy birthday, Ascent Stage.