The recently concluded year marks the first complete calendar cycle for Twelve Mile Circle. By now I’ve sweated and obsessed over the web logs in typical fashion to see what conclusions I can draw. Most visibly, only the splash page even cracks the Top 25 on my website.
This year one of my other obsessions — ferryboats — began to draw a lot of attention. It pushed other topics further down in the rankings. Those ferry pages take a lot of work to put together. However, upon completion, they become a set-it-and-forget-it experience although I do need to check the links occasionally to keep them fresh.
Twelve Mile Circle follows a completely different pattern. I admit that I enjoy the intellectual challenge of coming up with topics and researching them. Of course, I find it wonderful that a handful of like-minded people actually read them and seem to enjoy them too. In addition, reader comments serve as great validation. But the fact remains that I’d write them it even if nobody ever read them once they left my fingertips. Do not consider this a rational pursuit.
Even so, various pages on Twelve Mile Circle get more readership than others. In case you’re interested, here are the Top 10 topics on Twelve Mile Circle from 2008.
The Smallest County in the United States series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
Collectively these encompass by far the most popular pages on Twelve Mile Circle. A surprisingly amount of traffic comes directly from people who type a specific Snapple “Real Fact” into a search engine. Snapple’s claim is wrong by the way: Manhattan is by no means the smallest county in the United States no matter how many asterisks one tries to place upon it. Another county will always come up smaller in every regard. Iced tea bottle caps do not substitute for solid secondary source materials. Kids, remember that the next time you get a homework assignment.
Arizona Does Not Recognize Daylight Saving Time
This one goes through an odd semiannual hibernation, waking up to great activity when standard and daylight savings time trade places, only to snuggle back to sleep for another six months.
The Wisconsin Floods in the Summer of 2008
I wrote a couple of dispatches from the northland during a period of unusual flooding last summer: in Wisconsin and specifically at Lake Delton. These still get steady traffic primarily due to online photo searches that come across to the awesome picture I took of the house on Lake Delton that split in half after the channel broke beneath it. I understand that the lake is fixed now so my little walk through its stump-filled trough was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Australia’s Highest Elevation
An overseas travel log picked up this page and sent a bunch of traffic my way. I like this posting because the answer makes no sense unless you know the secret.
Double Landlocked Countries
I think this might be a common trivia question because search queries deliver people here all the time.
GPS and Genealogy
Ah yes, the outhouse posting. I attempted to tie together two activities I enjoy immensely, geography and genealogy, by demonstrating the potential of GPS technology for personal history research. I provided several examples to demonstrate the point. One of them happened to be a privy from the farm of an ancestor that the family donated to a museum. Now it resides in its permanent collection. A genealogy blog featured the post and sent a bunch of traffic to the site. Naturally they highlighted the outhouse at the expense of the rest of the article. Serious efforts will always get trumped by potty humor.
Georgia Border Dispute
Georgia experienced a protracted drought. Many of its reservoirs remained below capacity especially in the northwestern part of the state. One legislator decided that perhaps he could reopen an old border dispute and push the state line a couple miles further into Tennessee. Then they could tap into one of their rival’s reservoirs. It became a somewhat lighthearted spat.
Nonetheless it foreshadows more serious confrontations that will spread as population growth and climate change collide. I also got a lot of hits when Russia invaded the country of Georgia last year; wrong Georgia of course but the search engines couldn’t tell them apart.
Highest and Lowest, Oh So Close
One small corner of California contains the highest mountain in the Lower 48 States and the lowest elevation in North America, both within surprisingly close proximity.
Automatic Geolocation on a BlackBerry
I sat in a hotel room while on a business trip with nothing much to do. Naturally I started playing with the mapping features on my BlackBerry phone. What, you don’t turn to maps for entertainment when you’re bored, too? This page gets traffic from two very different sources: a BlackBerry blog that links to it; and search engine queries from people wondering whether the government can track them down.
USA States Called Commonwealths
Frankly, I don’t know why this one generates traffic. It’s an amusing fact, for me anyway, but I’m surprised anyone else cares. The answer is Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, by the way.
Bonus
Oh, and if you ever want an index of every article ever posted on Twelve Mile Circle, you can look here. I still haven’t found a good way to present this using this particular WordPress template. Maybe someday.
All the best in 2009.
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