100 posts: a retrospective

This is the 100th blog post on elidourado.com. That may not seem like a lot. Some bloggers write that many in an afternoon. However, that’s not my style; with few exceptions, mostly halting experiments, I’ve tried to write meaty and thoughtful posts. Looking over my oeuvre now it’s clear I did not always succeed. But on the whole, I’m pleased with the result: I’m not an internet celebrity, but there is a merry band of nerds who read what I write, offer good feedback, and help me refine my views.

My first blog post was written on November 8, 2009, 582 days ago. That post, Monetary Confusion, has received only 12 pageviews to this day. It took 144 days to write something that attracted commenters in the double digits. Chris Anderson linked to A Theory of Google on Twitter. It’s still my second most-viewed post.

My most-viewed post is Why Does Apple Offer Free Engraving? I had no idea when I wrote it that it would take off like it did. It received 10,000 pageviews the first day it was up. If I had known so many people were going to read it, I would have taken more care in writing it. I had to write a follow-up post to clarify why answers other than the one I offered could not be correct.

My most profitable post is the recent Can the War on Drugs Bootstrap Bitcoin? A kind soul took me up on my tongue-half-in-cheek suggestion to send me some of the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. I am grateful.

My most searched-for post is my summary of Friedrich Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society, which appears on the first page of the (de-personalized) Google results for that phrase.

In 19 months of blogging, I wrote only one funny post, The Great Stagnation, a Straussian Reading. At least, it was intended to be funny, and it is the only post tagged “humor.” None of the people who commented on the post seemed to get the joke. Speaking of tags, I offer this neat tag cloud that you can use to browse the blog archives.

I cherish my commenters, but the quality of comments I received was not uniformly high. On the whole, I would say that my theory of blog comments continues to be validated. The prize for the most offensive comment goes to a pseudonymous “Economist” who called me “the lowest form of shit on the planet” because of my big government (!) views.

Fortunately, “Economist” is not representative of my readers, for whom I am most grateful. The community surrounding this blog is smart, supportive, interesting, and unafraid to challenge me. People say that blogs are dying, but I plan to keep blogging as long as you guys stick around.

If you’re new around here, don’t be shy. Feel free to participate in the comments, or to say hello on Twitter. And neglect not the RSS feed, which will not overwhelm you; it has had only 100 posts in 583 days.