It’s the end of the year, when it’s instinctive (or is merely traditional?) to look back and tally how we’ve been doing.

Even though this blog has only been in existence for about six months, I’ve always been curious about what the top posts are. A handful of title always pop up in my “Site Stats” area.

Let’s see if we can learn any lessons.

1. N=many is go!

While I very much regret to say that I didn’t finish the initial 90-day carnivore cohort over at N Equals Many, I was really excited to help out at first. I’m still definitely a carnivore, but I stopped tracking around 30 days in at the end of September. This is mostly because the “roller coaster” portion of my year kicked in and I prioritized keeping my sanity amidst getting a new job and moving, instead of trying to track everything. If you’re interested in carnivory, join us during World Carnivore Month in January 2018.

Anyway, I linked to NEqualsMany from that post, and I get traffic from the pingback.

2. A metric: the Creative Achievement Questionnaire 

This one surprises me, as it was born on a day that I had no idea what to write. I was looking around for a “quiz” or fillable question set to use as a template, and since Jordan B Peterson was on my mind, I found this questionnaire. It’s an interesting metric to check creative achievement against. I appreciate how it encompasses all different types of creativity, including scientific and architectural achievement. I question if someone can be truly well-rounded in this modern era of fine-tuned achievements, but it’s still a fun way to measure. Since posting this, I haven’t moved earned any new points, but I’m building a plan to do so in the next six months.

There’s no pingback on the post that I linked to, so people must find it from search.

3. Photo of the week: I hate dating edition

Ah, when I was new in town and spending a lot of time on Tinder and had just launched a series called “photo of the week.” Dating still sucks, and I try to avoid being in those positions.

I linked to this one on Twitter and tagged the person who took the photos, so it makes sense that this post gets traffic.

4. A very personal review of The Promethean by Owen Stanley

My very first fiction review! It’s not a great review, objectively, because my book reviews are very green at this point in my writing career. My thoughts are numerous, but I am not yet disciplined at corralling them into strings of paragraphs that make sense. I always want to tell the truth, but sometimes it’s difficult to write the truth of what I think about something with the thought in mind that the author could read it. The double-edge sword of the internet, I suppose.

I suspect that this post gets hits because I doubt there are very many reviews of it out there, especially outside of Amazon.

5. People who naturally write in passive voice

This is an old post. “Old.” Back at the beginning of this blog, I challenged myself to come up with a longer piece each week, like a weekly column. This was the first establishment (of two), and it gave me an excuse to delve into a people and writing problem that had been bothering me.

No idea where there traffic on this one comes from, which is kinda cool. Looks like I should write more of these long, introspective (extrospective?) posts.

In conclusion, there’s not much similarity between the five posts. The breadth represents most of the topics that I write about, except for fashion and k-pop.

It’s fascinating to me that only two of the posts had easily-identifiable pingback links. Perhaps I can extrapolate new blog ideas to explore from the organic traffic-attracting posts–like doing more looking into “creative achievement.”

It’s also obviously worth writing about my life as a carnivore, and writing book reviews.

But I’m still going to write what I want. That’s how I made it this far, and how I’ll make it another six months.