A few year-end observations about this blog:

Readership continued to slowly increase this year. Late last spring I noticed that I had over 5,000 unique visitors to my Web site in one month, and probably four fifths of them visited this blog. I am mildly shocked that so many people visited this blog — that’s far beyond my most optimistic goals for this site. Oddly, I find I have stopped paying attention to readership statistics.

More numbers: The 1,500th post went up sometime in December. Even as my readership goes up, my Technorati ranking drops — it’s now at 23, half what it was when I started out — go figure. The index to this blog now contains more than 225 entries.

Historical factoid: This blog began its life as an AOL blog. For a long time after I transferred all the posts to this site, I maintained the original blog as hosted by AOL. But this fall, AOL finally did away with its blog hosting service, and the original blog is now finally gone.

Sturgeon’s Law predicts that 90% of anything is crap, which would imply that there were some 36 good posts on this blog this year. Some of the best posts were based on material sent in by blog readers, like this parody of “Spirit of Life”. I think one of my best posts was a video attack ad. One of my favorite posts documented local religious history. Another of my favorite posts simply documented ordinary life.

The absolute best part about writing this blog has been hearing from you, the readers. Some of your comments here on the blog have been extraordinarily insightful. Your email messages to me have ranged from intellectually stimulating to poignant to hilarious. And every once in a while, I get to talk to a reader face-to-face, which is most fun of all. I love hearing from you — that’s what really makes this whole endeavor worth my while.