Most Popular Ten Posts During August: Don't Back Down

With all the attention I've been paying to statistics, I thought I'd take a look and see where traffic has been headed lately, which of course raises the question of whether to look at current content (in other words, posts I made this month) or total content (posts that have been made since the site was started). I have to say that I still haven't decided, but for the moment, I'm leaning towards the latter. After all, if a post was written years ago, and it's still more popular than a post that was written a week ago, then there's probably a reason for it.

I'd like to think that I'm keeping things current, but maybe I'm just not. So I'd like to start off by looking at the posts that have been the most popular overall. I'm interested to hear your feedback, however - if you are more interested in a monthly recap, then perhaps I can do separate posts, or even combine them into one. I'm not a huge fan of metrics (that's really my wife's thing), but I do like to see what is getting people's attention. Let me know what you think.

While I decided that I'd look at the most popular posts overall, I figured I would start with the most popular 10. People seem to like "10 best" lists and the like, right? So without further ado, here it is:

A couple of things jump out at me about this list.

First and foremost is that one of the very first posts I wrote - The Angler Fish - is still up there. If memory serves, it was the 12th post on this site (some of you might get a chuckle out of that), and it's now over four years old. But it was the second most popular link last month. Go figure.

The next thing that jumps out at me is that not a single one of the entries is from 2007. In fact, the most recent one was written in July of 2006. I guess perhaps I'm not keeping as current as I thought, and maybe I ought to look at what I'm writing. Either that, or maybe my everyday content just isn't as likely to turn up in search engines, which is where a lot (75% or so) of the traffic for the site comes from. That's interesting.

Three of the entries have to do with Windows and two health care, but the others are all one shot posts that just struck a chord with someone. Though the whole Treasure Hunters Challenge did fairly well in the results - Week 1 (Golden Spruce), Week 6 (Ghost Town), Week 7 (Sleepy Hollow), Week 8 (Spanish Doubloon/Fireplace) and Week 4 (Thomas Edison) also showed up just after these entries, in this order. For whatever reason, Week 2 (Abraham Lincoln) and Week 3 (West Point) barely registered. Taking those all together would likely have made them the single highest entry.

What do you think? Are these the most interesting entries on the site? Should I post about something different based on this - or any other - information?