2011 will be a fantastic year — or at least, a prime one! (See these posts by Gary, Pat, and James.) But as we move into the new year, it’s also a good time to look back and to look ahead: What did we accomplished last year? And what comes next?
More specifically, for bloggers:
So here is my retrospective look at the most popular blog posts of 2010, along with related blogging goals (or dreams?) for 2011.
[Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.]
Can you believe we’re almost a whole decade into the no-longer-new millennium? Traditionally, the last week of December marks a time to look back and to look ahead: What have we accomplished this year? And what comes next?
More specifically, for bloggers:
Maria beat me to it. John did a twist on the topic. And here is my own retrospective look at the most popular blog posts from this year, along with related blogging goals for 2010.
I’ve checked the total post views count as of Wednesday morning, December 30th. Any such list is biased toward posts that appeared earlier in the year. It’s almost impossible for anything written in November or December — even something as popular as Narnia math — to work its way into the Top Ten.
[Image from Let’s Play Math! blog, a little more than a year ago.]
Looks different, doesn’t it? My blog has changed so much in the past year that I hardly recognized it myself. I had some nostalgic fun clicking around the old articles — two of which still show up on the “Most Popular Posts” sidebar list.
I am so grateful to all of you have stuck with me and have passed my article links on to your fellow teachers or homeschooling friends. Thank you all!
If you’d like to explore the history of your blog or favorite website, you can enter the link at:
[Photo by krisdecurtis.]
Being moderately tech-illiterate, I don’t pay much attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimization, the magic art of convincing Google to fetch me more readers). Even so, I enjoy browsing through the list of search terms that have brought visitors to my blog. Sometimes I find ideas to write about, or motivation to move an old draft off the back burner, or simply a chuckle at the funny things people look for on the Web.
This month, however, the most popular search term seems strangely out of season — more than 300 people have come to this site wanting “Christmas” or “Christmas tree.”
This picture is my all-time favorite LolCat, because it is so true to life. Every time I sit down to read a book or grade homework, one of our kittens plops herself on top of it and starts chewing the corners.
Jonathan tagged me for the blog evolution meme, in which one chooses five posts that represent the development of one’s blog. Hmmm…
David Ng started it. Kurt Van Etten improved it. And I heard about it from MathMom. Now, you’re invited to play, too. It’s fun!
1. Search for your blog on Google. Try to find 5 different phrases that produce your blog as the #1 hit.
2. You may enclose the search phrase in quotes if necessary, but a search without quotes is preferred.
3. Score your search phrases based on the total number of hits. As Kurt wrote:
The ideal search phrase would have your blog being number one out of something like a million hits returned. As it turns out, this is much easier to do than it might sound.
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
Joyful Days kindly nominated me for the Thinking Blogger Award back in the days of the dinosaurs. Well, she isn’t that old, really — it was only last April. I am grateful to her for thinking of me, and ever since then I have been thinking deeply about whom to nominate in my turn. Or, to be more precise, I printed out the nomination post as a reminder, and then it got lost in a pile of “to sort/read/file” papers on a shelf under my desk…
I get a bit tired of the various memes [definition: things to blog about when you have no ideas of your own, a state with which I can easily identify!] that float around the blogsphere—songs from A’s iPod, irrelevant things that nobody knew about B, or C’s favorite TV commercials… But Dana at Principled Discovery has a new meme that actually looks interesting.
Objective: Share ten of your favorite posts, although they went largely unnoticed in the broader blogosphere.
Sometimes I laugh when I read the search engine terms that have led people to my blog. Other times I’m left scratching my head. What in the world are these people thinking? So, for your reading pleasure, I present a few phrases that must have meaning to someone:
Well, it sound more dramatic than the cannonballs and flying arrows we used when I took physics.
As in, “I’m crazy about math”? Or is it, “Math drives me crazy”?
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 