Now I am Six!

When I was One, I had just begun;
When I was Two, I was nearly new;
When I was Three, I was hardly me;
When I was Four, I was not much more;
When I was Five, I was just alive;
But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be Six now for ever and ever!
           — A.A. Milne

So here’s a self-congratulatory Happy Sixth Birthday ^[1] to ***Dave Does the Blog.  That’s 11,465 posts (not counting htis one), 20,557 comments (not counting the ones from the pre-native-comment-capable Blogger days), a whole lot of bad jokes, comic reviews, pointless screeds, pointless day-in-the-lifes, and a variety of loyal readers who obviously get something out of being here. 

My only regrets are that I didn’t get into blogging until well after Katherine was born.

And to the future?  Well, I don’t have any plans on stopping doing this.  My posting rate and my political/cultural relevancy have diminished a scosh over the past couple of years (i.e., I’m writing less and being less political), so the readership has dropped a bit.  I’m only a Slimy Mollusc ^[2] in the TTLB Ecosystem, whereas once I romped as a Flappy Bird and even an Adorable Rodent ^[3], etc. 

According to Google Analytics, I’m still drawing about 173 visits (133 unique visitors) a day, which isn’t InstaPundit, but isn’t bad at all if you think about it.  (Those numbers include all the hill-kleerup.org blogs here, including Blog of Heroes and Margie’s Kitchen, but the vast majority are to this blog.)

A little over half the visitors come here once; the rest return for more, remarkably enough.  The vast majority are from the US and the rest of the English-speaking world, but I actually get visits (legit or not) from all around the globe.  A bare sliver more use IE than Firefox/Mozilla.  Most are on Windows, though about 10% are on Macs and there are a few others.

The front page, of course, gets by far the most traffic.  But besides that, the most visited (non-recent) posts in the last month or so?

1. Comcast DVR and TiVo ^[4] (Dec. 2004)
2. The Rules of Jaywalking ^[5] (Sep. 2002)
3. Why U.S. Bank sucks, and Margie is marvelous ^[6] (Jun. 2002)
4. Home Depot’s Service Desk Sucks ^[7] (May 2005)
5. Disney’s Magical Express ^[8] (Jun. 2006)

Obviously consumer information is something folks come here a lot for.  If I wanted popularity, that’s probably the direction I’d go.  Good thing I don’t want popularity, right?

Most commented-upon posts:

1. Why U.S. Bank sucks, and Margie is marvelous ^[6] (Jun. 2002):  152 comments
2. The Rules of Jaywalking ^[5] (Sep. 2002):  44 comments
3. The Worst Part … ^[9](Nov. 2004):  41 comments
4. Suing our own fat asses off ^[10] (May 2002):  31 comments
5. Root causes ^[11] (Nov. 2004):  30 comments

And a host of others.  The period around the beginning of the Iraq War was hot stuff for comments.

What’s ahead for DDtB in the next year?  I do very much want to get into MT4 in a few months, which will bring with it a change in the page layout and (hopefully) a simplified formatting scheme to keep up.  I expect I’ll be nattering more about the US Presidential Elections for the next year and a half, along with the usual potpourri of whatever shiny thing catches my eye.

Thanks to all, though, for your support — especially to Doyce for getting me started on this whole blogging thing in the first place, and to Margie for putting up with it since then.