Saturday, April 18, 2015

Holidays for the fourth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News


I concluded DOOM for the fourth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News with a preview of coming attractions.
Stay tuned for another recurring theme in the next entry in this series, holidays.  I love holidays!
The most read entry that celebrated a special day during the blogging year that ended on March 20th was Evolution humor for Darwin Day posted on February 12, 2015.  It earned 487 page views to land in 11th place on the most read list.  I explained how it earned those page views in Montly meta: top ten entries for February 2015.
I intended Evolution humor for Darwin Day as a throwaway humor entry for the first of a string of holidays.  It ended up being a runaway success, as Infidel 753 on Blogspot placed it first in a series of links, resulting in more than 50 visits, then I promoted it at Greer's blog, where it got at least 33 referrals.  It earned 439 page views by Noon Monday, good enough for second place.
Here's what I posted at The Archdruid Report.
Greer: The popular notion of progress presupposes that there’s an inherent dynamic to history, that things change, or tend to change, or at the very least ought to change, from worse to better over time.  That presupposition then gets flipped around into the even more dubious claim that just because something’s new, it must be better than whatever it replaced."

Me: That observation doesn't just apply to technology.  It also applies to biological evolution and cultural practices as well.  When I observed Darwin Day last week, I posted two cartoons showing how dinosaurs evolving into birds may have been a winner in terms of surviving the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, but it was a loser in terms of being the dominant group of land animals, at least in terms of size and position in the food web.  The result was that the genes benefitted, but the individual suffered.  Progress?  Not if you started off as one of the raptor dinosaurs and ended up as a chicken.
Greer thanked me for the cartoons.  He's quite welcome.

Follow over the jump for another holiday entry from this past year plus one posted near the end of the third year that earned most of its page views during the fourth year.

The second entry from last year celebrating a holiday that made the top twenty was Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!  I posted it on Monday, October 13, 2014.  It earned 474 page views, apparently from web search, to place it 13th among the past year's 20 most read.  As I noted in Ebola news from campuses on the campaign trail and Discovery News, most of those page views came the first day.
Instead of following up on Michigan prepares for Ebola after Dallas patient dies, I posted Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!  It paid off, as that entry got 354 page views in 24 hours.
Most of the rest, I probably got from sharing the link at Kunstler's blog, wishing Kunstler's readers "Happy Canadian Thanksgiving to you! Columbus Day? No, I’m not calling it that any more."

Finally, I give an honorable mention to Tipsy Bartender drinks for St. Patrick's Day, posted only three days before the end of the previous blogging year, so it had no chance to make the top twenty unless something remarkable, such as what happened to the Canadian Thanksgiving entry, occurred.  Just the same, it garnered enough page views during the past blogging year that it would have made the top ten, probably in sixth.  Monthly meta: page views and posts for March 2015 and goals for April 2015 tells the tale.
I end this countdown where I stared it, with "Tipsy Bartender drinks for St. Patrick's Day."  The top post of March and the winner of the back catalog trophy was the recipient of lots of web search hits last month, earning this blast from the past, specifically last year, 241 page views.  The entry had 684 page views total as of March 20th and 689 as of the end of the month.  I will feature it in an upcoming retrospective about holidays as an honorary mention.
May this year's holiday entries fare as well as the ones from last year and the year before last.

I plan two more entries in this series, the next about movements I really detest and the last about winners from the back catalog.  Stay tuned.

Previous entries in this series.
at

No comments:

Post a Comment