Self-Referential Post

I confess: I’ve been engaged here at the League for this long only so that I can get my hands on the behind-the-scenes interface. Now that Erik has fallen for my long-laid plan, I’m going to let the rest of the community see some of the site behind the curtain.

I’m a data nut, so sue me.

I started reading this site long enough ago that I don’t remember exactly when I started. Of course, the site existed before I started reading it, and like any newbie I read a few of the older posts to try and grok the context of both the posters and the frequent visitors. Of course, this is limited to a very brief overview; suffice to say my original impressions of most of you weren’t entirely borne out by the months since.

Here’s some interesting side notes for the viewing public.

The home page has netted close to a million views since January 2009, the whole site has over two and a half million views. This says that more than half of our traffic comes from following direct links or searches to individual posts, which is an interesting note.

Feb 2011 was our best month. Tongue-in-cheek note to the community: we should draft a committee to analyze our postings in Feb 2011 so that we can tailor our deliverables to the synergy of the inside and outside community, to increase our ability towards monetization of the site. Because we’re totally missing out on traffic, here. Looking below: we need more pictures of Megan Fox, for one thing, and definitely more posts pointing at other bloggers so that we can suck up their readership.

There are 4,674 total posts on the blog. There are 412 Drafts (one of which is a draft of this one), and 14 posts in the trash, at least two of which have an interesting enough title that I’m dying to read them, but ethics forbids. I’d post more about the Drafts section, but that might be getting too deep into everyone’s writing process than is strictly kosher without an okay. Lest the other writers feel unease: I’m not even looking at that section, I swear.

Our number one blog post by views is this one by Jason. The top ten looks like this:

1. Jason’s
2. E.D.’s content-less Megan Fox picture
3. E.D.’s interview with Charles Johnson of LGF
4. E.D.’s post about mathematics education
5. E.D.’s writeup about a lecture by Art Spiegelman
6. E.D.’s post about April Fool’s jokes on the web
7. Mark Thompson’s Pigford post
8. E.D.’s post about getting on Mark Levin’s “Deranged Blogger” list
9. E.D.’s post about Steven Colbert and conservative self-parodying.
10. Chris Dierkes on Glenn Beck

This of course is dramatically different from the top ten posts by comments.

1. E.D.’s post about Libertarianism and Power, 431 comments
2. Jason on Birtherism, 401 comments
3. Jason on “The middle class isn’t dying”, 384 comments
4. Elias (as a Guest Blogger) on America, Forever at War, 346 comments
5. Rufus on Lucretius, 337 comments
6. The redoubtable Mr. Thompson, on Robert Smalls, 335 comments
7. E.D.’s Labor 2.0 post, 319 comments
8. Jason’s post in counter to Balloon Juice, 316 comments
9. Mark on Reasonable People, 314 comments
10. James K on Libertarianism and Privilege, 311 comments

At some point I’ll analyze our wordy lot and find out who blathers the most.