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 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 in the TTLB Ecosystem, whereas once I romped as a Flappy Bird and even an Adorable Rodent, 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 (Dec. 2004)
2. The Rules of Jaywalking (Sep. 2002)
3. Why U.S. Bank sucks, and Margie is marvelous (Jun. 2002)
4. Home Depot’s Service Desk Sucks (May 2005)
5. Disney’s Magical Express (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 (Jun. 2002):  152 comments
2. The Rules of Jaywalking (Sep. 2002):  44 comments
3. The Worst Part … (Nov. 2004):  41 comments
4. Suing our own fat asses off (May 2002):  31 comments
5. Root causes (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.