Woo hoo! The blog just passed the five-year mark! Virtual cake all around, some fun with stats and some best-of stuff.

First post was on August 14, 2004. Since then, there have been:

• 874 posts
• 2,196 comments
• 4,737 spam comments screened out (You’re welcome.)

And since January 1, 2007:

• There have been 31,631 visits from 121 countries.
• Readership has gone down by 17%(!) What, with stellar content like this? That’s just weird!
• Currently, the site averages 32 visits per day
• Highest number of visits was on May 14, 2007 with 184 visits (that was for the “Red Pen” post that I list below)
• 5% have visited over 100 times
• 4.5% spend 10-30+ minutes.
• 23% come from Google searches; almost 10% come from Orthodixie. (The check’s in the mail, Fr. Joseph!)

Here are some of my favorites in a few categories:

Biggest splash:

• In the Ortho-blogosphere: If the LDS took a red pen to the Nicene Creed. When Mitt Romney was a candidate, there was a lot of misinformation going around about what the Mormons actually believed. I had done some investigation of my own years ago, and thought this format might help eliminate some of the smoke and mirrors.
• In the regular blogosphere: Red state, blue state, me state, you state. After Bush was re-elected ‘04, furious Blue Staters seemed to want to tighten the leash. I thought what they needed was a carefully worded contract of their expectations for the rest of us. This got picked up on InstaPundit and caused an “Instalanche” of comments, none of which (regrettably) came over when I got into WordPress.

Funniest (to me, anyway): 7 signs the end times begin in 2007.  Thanks to the top-notch prophecy/reporting of a supermarket tabloid, I was able to run down all the events that will lead up to the Second Coming in late 2007. It made it easier to plan vacations, you see.

Funniest (to me, again) — political: Had a little fun with the Bush/Kerry debates HERE and HERE. Already seems like such a long time ago, doesn’t it?

Favorite adventure with dog: It’s like an internet of smell. Seemed to me that dogs have their own version of IM’ing, email, texting and all the rest.

Favorite drawing — To be honest, they’re all my favorite, but if I have to pick one: Wildlife sighting for an August afternoon. Showing how it looked when we saw an owl isn’t my prettiest work, but I was able to capture exactly what it felt like, which is always the best part.

So there it is. I’ve wasted a LOT of time on the blog and had a LOT of fun. And I think I’ve done more of the latter, so I suppose that’s success, right?