Retrospectacular

So it’s been a year! Here are some blog facts:

• 103 Posts
• 133 Likes
• 5117 Visitors
• 7664 Page views
• 11 Comments

The page which has gotten the most natural traffic from search engines: The Inimitable John Quincy St. Clair

The page with the most traffic overall: Patenting Your Perpetual Motion Machine

The page with the most likes: The Rowbike

Each of these is interesting to me in its own way. The first was my first substantive post on the blog. Apparently Mr. St. Clair has enough traction in the popular consciousness to generate a steady trickle of visitors.

The second was from a post on Hacker News, which by itself generated 3611 views–almost half of the blog’s total views for the past year. Per a friend, “Oh, perpetual motion? You gave HN an excuse to smell its own farts about how smart it is that it knows something people were taught in high-school physics.” I should do more of that…

The third is the strangest. That post gets likes from a bunch of fitness-related WordPress accounts. I initially assumed they were all bots that are liking posts tagged with “fitness,” but when I tested that hypothesis, the second post got a lower rate of likes and from different accounts. Maybe it was actually bicycle bots instead of more general fitness bots? Further research is needed.

The big question is where to go from here. I have enjoyed this as a creative outlet, and there is certainly more material to write about. However, I may not keep up the two-posts-a-week pace that I have mostly maintained for the past year. I also probably won’t try to hit every holiday either, since there just aren’t many patents for the ones that are sparsely celebrated in the U.S. But at the very least, I hope to keep up the reporting on the weirder IP-related developments in the world.

If there’s something you particularly liked, or would like to see more of, let me know!