When I went to dig into all of the historical stats for my blog the other day, little did I know that it was at such a well-chosen moment: it turns out that today, Friday 30 November, is exactly five years since I first posted to the Geero.net blog (that post was “And now for something completely different“).

In that time there have been some highs and some lows, some periods of regular posting and some times of hardly posting at all. It’s largely been a real blessing to me to write all this stuff, even if nobody has really read any of it, and I’m thankful to God for the opportunity. If all you want to know is what the most popular posts have been during that time, skip to the end. But for those who are interested in a little more detail, I reckon there were about six eras in the life of Geero.net:

1. Beginner’s luck (Nov 2007 – Apr 2008) – initially I was mostly posting all of my pent-up ideas about making Bible-teaching computer games. I would write several drafts of each article and post infrequently, but they were probably more interesting posts as a result. Most of these are now found on my separate Old Testament Adventures blog.
2. Relative obscurity (Apr 2008 – Feb 2009) – by this point I’d run out of interesting ideas about Bible games and was having to make stuff up as I went. Unsurprisingly, nobody really read my blog during this period.
3. LucasArts nostalgia (Mar 2009 – Jan 2010) – I slightly changed tack at this point and started posting more generally about the Point & Click adventure games that inspired my Bible games, with posts about games like The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. These proved fairly popular amongst a wider audience and brought in a few extra visitors.
4. Randomness that worked (Feb 2010 – Dec 2012) – somewhat depressingly, the period that brought in most visitors to the blog was filled with totally random posts about some really strange things that weren’t necessarily all that exciting to me. My biggest hit of all time was created during this period, which was very much one of my passions and not too surprising to discover it was well-received: The OTHER Secret of Monkey Island, helped by a massive boost from Hacker News (and a great voice-over by David Hall). But other big hits include West Cornwall Pasty vs the Big Mac and some stuff about programming Unity games on the iPhone. These were mostly good for ongoing Google traffic rather than for regular readers of the blog.
5. Why Jesus Is My Hero (Jan 2011 – Oct 2011) – I think this was the real high point of the blog, with the most regular readers tuning in for actual blog content rather than random nutritional information. I got into a good rhythm of posting an article on “Why Jesus is My Hero” every Sunday (starting with I’m No Hero). I think I was generally managing to post these at Sunday lunchtimes which seemed to be a good time for various reasons. It’s well known that regularity really helps when trying to build blog traffic, and my experience totally backs that up.
6. On the wane (Oct 2011 – Oct 2012) – for various personal reasons, blogging fell somewhat lower in my priorities during this period. I was still posting my Why Jesus is My Hero posts right up until June 2012, but I shifted to a Sunday evening pattern which suited me better, but perhaps accounts for the decreased response. In case you were wondering, I finally finished the series this week, with The First and the Last, an article that I had been dying to write ever since I started the series but which I knew had to be the last instalment.

Most Popular Posts

Here’s the bit you’ve all been waiting for – the hall of fame of the Top 10 pages of all time on Geero.net:

1. The OTHER Secret of Monkey Island – my followup video to the big conspiracy theory The True Secret of Monkey Island
2. My version of the open source DirectX Exporter for Blender – yes, depressingly boringly. But apparently quite interesting to those who need such a thing.
3. The Bible Games tab – now it just redirects you to the Old Testament Adventures blog, but once upon-a-time this page used to host details of my game.
4. West Cornwall Pasty vs the Big Mac – one day after watching Super-sized Me I just really wanted to know how many calories there were in a West Cornwall Pasty, only to discover that that information wasn’t online. So I emailed them and wrote this slightly random post, only for it to turn into one of the most read things on my entire blog. Weird.
5. Why Programmers Find it So Hard to Be Christians – this was the product of various observations I’ve made over my life, and seemed to strike a chord with some people. I got a lot of emails about this one.
6. How to Install PythonMagick on OS X – yes, another really depressing entry in the hall of fame. After spending several days trying to overcome problem after problem installing an image manipulation library on my Macbook, I wrote this post listing all of the errors I got and how to solve them. Google loves that kind of thing.
7. Tips for Taking Over Someone Else’s Code – inspired by my work on the Blender Exporter, this was a fairly general interest article for all programmers, and seemed to be fairly popular.
8. Programming under the Lordship of Christ – one of the first blog posts I ever wrote, this was about how being a Christian changes the way you work. Even now people still email about this every now and again, and by God’s grace people seem to have found it helpful.
9. Why Our Best Works are But Filthy Rags – part of a little series I was trying to write on humility, this turns out to be a phrase that people Google for surprisingly frequently.
10. Why God Is Better Than the Chairman – Thoughts on ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ – some reflections after watching the disappointing movie.

Some of those posts were really random, and aren’t going to make much of an impact on the world. But I hope and pray that one or two of them will have helped even just a few people love and follow Jesus a little better than they did before.