Here's a list of the most popular posts on Exploring Our Matrix this year (of course, the year isn't quite over, but unless something very surprising happens in the next few days, the list is unlikely to change). The list goes up to 11. You'll see why at the end. Counting down…
11. “Ten Really Bad Reasons to Believe in a Historical Adam.”
10. “What Fundamentalists Worship”
9. “Jabba's Binders Full of Women”
8. “How to Care for Introverts”
7. “Christian: What I Really Do”
6. “The Vista Black Screen After Login Mystery…Solved!”
5. “Religion Professors: What I Really Do”
4. “The Ending of LOST Explained”
2. “Think Outside the Box (The Cutest Response to Creationism Ever!)”
The troubleshooting post about Windows Vista is from 2007, well before the blog moved to Patheos. And so I was struck to find that it continues to get so much traffic that it was one of the most popular posts during 2012. The post about the ending of LOST is from 2010, and what surprises me most is that there are that many people still watching the show and trying to make sense of the final episode! The post with the cute rabbits as an illustration of creationism is from last year but continues to get traffic from StumbleUpon and occasionally gets reshared on Reddit or Twitter and so goes viral again.
If I limited the “Top 10” list to posts written or created this year, rather than just the ones that got the most visits this year, I'd have to skip another high ranker about Tron: Legacy, as well as dropping the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph as having been written before 2012. Instead I would need to include posts about the so-called Original Aramaic Lord's Prayer, what Darth Vader really does, and Ken Ham the con artist.
But what about the #1 visited page? It actually turned out that the most visits this year were to the front page of the blog! And so that's one reason why I debated about mentioning it. It isn't an individual post, but it got significantly more visits directly there than any individual post did. I decided to mention it because it is meaningful to me. It shows that, while often it is the humorous posts and meme images that may get spread the most enthusiastically, occasionally going viral, there are clearly regular visitors and readers who come to the blog itself, and don't just get here from a link someone forwarded to them.
And so, on that note, I'd be interested to know what the personal favorite posts of the year, or of all time, are, for regular readers, if it were to be decided not by traffic volume or pageviews but by votes from readers. Which would you choose? Which posts did you find the most personally meaningful, the most entertaining, the most whatever, this past year?
Thank you to all of you who read this blog!
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