Today is the third anniversary of this blog. Blimey. Half of me thinks it's flown by, I've only just started, half of me thinks - three years, that must be enough, I have nothing left to say.
Anyway, I hope you'll forgive a little birthday indulgence, it seems traditional to celebrate with a round-up of stats and posts so I'll do the same.
994 posts - I should have made it the round 1,000 for the third anniversary. But the 2,782 comments, that's all down to you lot. Well, mostly. Many thanks.
Technorati says that 978 links point to this blog. Or maybe 1,082. Who knows? More than you'd think anyway. Which makes me the 8,217th most read blogger in the world. (So if you think of Boing Boing as Liverpool FC, this makes me rather like a reasonably succesful junior school team. Doing quite well at a county level. Though I've just noticed that if you combine all my blogs I get to be the 3,924th most read blogger in the world, which maybe more like being Loughborough University's second team. Don't knock it. They do a lot of sports science there.)
According to statcounter (which I've been using since June 2005) I get an average of about 1,500 unique visitors a day. But that includes ebcb too, I've never worked out how to untangle them. The big spikes are visits from the BBC website, to do with the book.
But what always blows me away isn't the numbers, it's the fact the all these people come from all over the world. Brilliant. Out of the 9,000 visits in the current usage log (and I have no idea what that really means) 3,431 are from the UK, 2,247 are from the US, but more interestingly 32 are from Bulgaria, 15 are from Peru, 1 is from Angola and 122 are from Unknown.
Looking through the archives it becomes very clear that I have a very limited number of ideas and that I just keep repeating them. But
these are some of the bits that stick in my head:
Benches. They crop up here and here, two and a half years later.
Silly projects like 'Brands In Our Bathroom' and Hotel Telly. And of course, there was disappointment.
Remember this picture from ShowStudio?
And I think this is the post that taught me what blogging is all about. You just put stuff out there and the world decides what to do with it. Have a read of the 98 comments on this thing. They own this post, not me. Very interesting. And then this is when I noticed I was being read.
I won a pair of FLOM dunks and then I went on sabbatical starting here with Arthur's first appearance on the blog.
And ending 66 days later here, with Arthur worn out in the car.
Looking at the sabbatical entries again it's become clear to me that that was when I decided to build a life that involved more not-working regular hours, hence Nike, freelance and OIA. If you're a little disgrunteld with your working life, don't take a sabbatical, it's fatal.
I found this sign on the door of the loo's at Unilever.
Went to Bucharest with Bill.
I talked about life in badges.
ebcb won a yahoo prize.
We geeked out at the Acton Depot. And I stuck some of my w+k music up, featuring jed and joe. And actually started writing stuff about planning and that.
I think this is my favourite picture on the whole thing.
Here's the first APSotW mention and the first bit of video. And now I'm starting to think like I'm boring you all and there's no point recapping stuff that's not that old.
That's something else I've noticed about my blogging. Lots of it just seems to peter out...
...but before this one does can I just say how much I've enjoyed it all, because of you lot. That's been the best bit about the whole thing, making friends with all of y'all. Thanks.
