Top Posts

UPDATE: Due to a surge in spam bots pinging this blog, the statistics of which posts have received the most views have been dramatically distorted and will likely forever remain so. The Popular Posts gadget on this blog has thus been rendered completely unreliable.

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On the lower right side of this blog you’ll see that I have a gadget, called Popular Posts, dedicated to listing the top ten most popular writing pieces that I’ve published here. It’s an interesting list, with some posts landing a spot for reasons I know, and some for reasons I don’t. Today I thought I’d go down the list and give a quick thought on each of those posts and their popularity. I’ll be going in order of least popular to most popular, so if you’re looking at the list yourself it will appear that I’m discussing them from bottom to top. If you want read any of these posts, just click on their titles, or go to the Popular Posts gadget on the lower right and click on them.

10. Final Preparations
This post has the distinction of being the second writing piece to be published to this blog. It’s just one paragraph of text and a photo of all the things I was bringing with me to Europe in 2012, and I published it a few hours before I left for the airport. Back when I created this blog I told family and friends about it, and I think I mentioned it on Facebook too, so it’s no surprise that it got enough views to crack the top ten.

9. Netherlands Recap
The fifth writing piece published to this blog. Most of my travelogue posts from overseas are fairly long, but this is a short one that I quickly typed up before leaving Bruges, Belgium. At this point in the trip the early excitement was still going and people were still keeping up with what I was doing.

8. Arrival in Amsterdam
This is the fourth writing piece published to this blog, and it’s very similar to #8. I had arrived in Amsterdam after a short flight from London, and was most struck by the number of smokers (both tobacco and marijuana). Also, in rereading this post, I found a typo that I had never noticed or fixed, so now the post is now slightly better than it was before.

7. 100,000
It was just last month when this one went up, and I know the reason it’s in here is because I made a big deal out of it on Facebook. The post itself is nothing more than me announcing that I had published over 100,000 words to the blog for the year, and giving myself a pat on the back. Originally I had a different gif in mind for this post, but I couldn’t get it to work with Blogger, so I settled for the one you see today.

6. Venice: Dream’s End
I really have no idea why this travelogue post from the 2015 Europe trip got so many hits (the same goes for the post on Lyon). That said, I’m kind of glad it did, because Venice is my favorite city in Italy, and I like to think that this writing piece in some way communicated my fondness for it.

5. Remembering Big O
I am really pleased that Remembering Big O not only made the list, but also is sitting at #5, as it is one of my favorite writing pieces I’ve ever done on this blog. Even back when it was first published and was plagued by formatting errors (that were entirely Blogger’s fault), I knew I had created something special and distinct from most of the other work I did on this blog. Whether or not it’s actually any good is debatable, but for me it’s one of my prouder writing achievements.

4. Lyon: Confluence
Like the 2015 Venice post, I am clueless as to why this writing piece got its spot on the list. I don’t think it’s anything particularly special, and there are a number of other posts from the 2015 trip that I think are better, but somehow, someway, it is the #4 most popular post on this blog.

3. Ricardo goes to London, AKA The Blitz, Part 2
This was the third writing piece published to this blog, and like numbers 10, 9, and 8, it’s on the list because I told people about this blog and for the first week or so people would come and read it (after that I think everyone caught on to the fact that my travelogue posts can be kind of boring). Probably the reason this post scores so high on the list is because it was my first report from my first trip overseas, which was a big deal at the time.

2. Late to the Party - Call of Duty: Ghosts
Though not my first game commentary, this writing piece is the very first in my Late to the Party series of video game writing pieces, and I don’t know why it’s the #2 post on this blog, seeing as how I never advertised it. This writing piece created the general format that I’ve followed with most of the other Late to the Party posts, and in my mind it’s one of the more generic entries in the series, but apparently someone took an interest in it.

1. Paris: Breaking the Record
Standing at the top of the pyramid is the first major travelogue post from the 2015 Europe trip. I think I mentioned this one on Facebook and to a few friends, so that’s probably why it got to the #1 slot. In it I attempted to detail my time in Paris, but at the end I conceded that I would need a whole second post to cover everything. Maybe one day this post will get dethroned as the most popular post on this blog, and I’d be curious to know what takes its place.