Today it is three years since my first post on this blog. It doesn’t feel like that at all, ti seems much shorter. I don’t post very often, but sometimes I feel the need to put things down "on paper" and it feels good to have this outlet. It wasn’t my intention to have a personal blog, but I’ve been posting more and more personal stuff. So far I haven’t regretted it.
To celebrate the occasion, let’s have some fun with statistics. After exactly three years, this blog has a total of 220 post, 23 comments and 6664 views. Despite my intention of not making this a personal blog, the category "Personal" is the second largest category with 37 posts, but to be fair it is a bit of a mix of my personal posts about conversion, some stories, some rants and posts related to blog management or search terms.
My readers come from all over the world, it is really fascinating. I can only get statistics per calendar year, but the picture is pretty clear. In 2013 the top three countries were the US, Germany, and Israel, and in both 2014 and 2015 the US, Israel and the UK. I guess that’s to be expected when you write in English about Jewish topics. I’m intrigued that there have been visitors from exotic places like Kenya, South Korea, Madagascar, Micronesia, Sri Lanka, Colombia and even the Palestinian Territories. The internet is so amazing.
The highest number of views on a single day is 72, this happened on Monday, April 6, 2015. On this day, 7 visitors came to this blog with the query "mishna berura english translation online" and the page "Links to Jewish texts online" got 15 views. This is very typical, this page is responsible for a lot of traffic on this blog, although I cannot understand why, all I have is a link to an incomplete scan of the Mishna Brura on Google books. People are just strange.
The rest of the known search terms on that day were related to kitniot. Also a very typical reason for people to visit this blog, although more seasonal. The category "Pessach" is the biggest category on this blog with 44 posts. The vast majority of the Pessach posts is about kitniot, the topic that I obsessed about in the beginning of this blog in 2013. With 30 posts "kitniot" is the second-most used tag, the most-used one is "food".
In 2015 I started to write lists connected to kashrut. The post about kosher birds is the third-most viewed post in the last year with 533 views (after the Jewish texts page with 1852 and the home page with 668 views). That post is only a year old, but it holds the third place even in the all-time statistics (535 views, first place the Jewish texts with 2279 and the home page with 1218).
In my first post on this blog I declared my intention to blog on conservative Judaism. There is a total of 5 posts with this tag – for comparison, there are 10 posts on orthodox Judaism. Have I abandoned it? Well, I do not have any real connection to the movement, so I’m not really in the position to write so much about this branch of Judaism itself. But it is still the denomination I feel closest to and I would at least hope that my posts on other topics reflect that.
Enough for today, on we go to the next three years and more! Thank you for reading!