most-visited posts in 2024

I started using the static site-friendly, largely non-creepy Tinylytics service in 2023, and a few weeks ago, I finally forked over the money for the paid version of the service. [EDIT: I’ve since cancelled my subscription to the service because I’m no longer sure it aligns with my values.] This year, I’ve become skeptical enough of quantification as a concept that I feel vaguely guilty about tracking which of my posts get how many views, but I’m also a researcher who understands the value of quantification, and it’s also, well, validating to see which of my posts get traction. That said, I still know not to put too much faith in these numbers—for example, I got a very abnormal 537 hits to my website from Finland on October 24th that I just can’t figure out.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I thought it might at least be personally interesting to note which of my posts and pages got the most hits in 2024. (For what it’s worth, I got 8,324 hits across the entire site during the calendar year). Note that although I have my blog split into four subblogs, and although I’m posting this to my Myself section, I’m considering all of the posts across my website (though were I less lazy, I would probably write a different post for each subblog).

1st place (6 March 2024; 561 hits in 2024): coming to peace with the Kirtland Temple sale

I grew up a devout Mormon and for the past few years have been a non-theist member of Community of Christ, a denomination with similar roots but with much more progressive (and less literal) stances today. My current church is struggling for money and sold some property and artifacts that have historical value to both faiths to my previous church, and lots of people have lots of complicated feelings about that.

I don’t regret writing this post, and I still feel largely the same as I did when I wrote it, but I do worry about it a little bit. I know some people who are still devastated by the sale, and even though I’ve come to peace with it, the last thing I want is for my view to be dismissive of the pain that others feel. Anyway, I’m glad that this post seems to have gotten some traction, and I hope it’s been helpful for some, but I hope even more that it’s never come off as an argument that other people need to feel the way that I do about this whole thing.

2nd place (312 hits in 2024): my CV

Nothing much to say here except that I’m glad that my CV is getting a fair number of hits. Although I’m glad to have re-embraced personal blogging in various aspects, one of the main reasons for me to have a website is for sharing professional news and credentials—this feels like it justifies the work I put into keeping up an online version of my CV.

(Note that this is the only “page”—rather than “post”—that I’ll be paying attention to. The others are less interesting to me.

3rd place (7 May 2024; 260 hits in 2024): setting up POSSE-style microblogging with a Hugo static site and Micro.blog

I’m in a group chat with some grad school friends, and one recurring topic is our approaches to websites and social media. I’m the wild-haired, crazy-eyed experimenter of the bunch, and at one point, one of my friends encouraged me to write up everything that I’d been sharing in bits and pieces in the chat. This post was the result of that request, but while I’m glad it got some attention, I also don’t really know how to feel about it. As I wrote in the conclusion:

This is both far too long of a post and probably not enough detail to really get anyone else started!

It’s more of a stream-of-consciousness reflection than a helpful walkthrough, and while I’m happy to share my experience, I just don’t know if this would be helpful to anyone else. Alas.

4th place (9 March 2024; 212 hits in 2024): history, Elijah, and the Kirtland Temple

This is another post on the Kirtland Temple sale earlier this year. I meant what I said about being at peace with the sale, but I still wasn’t above expressing some pre-emptive concern with how I expected the Temple’s new owners to leverage its purported history to support its distinct theological claims. In short, there’s a claim about an angelic visit at the Temple that is key to contemporary Mormon theology, but the historical evidence suggests that the visit in question was not all that important to the people involved in the 1830s despite the huge importance its taken on since. Now, I don’t believe that something has to be historically “real” to be personally meaningful (as I hint at in the post, I like Easter a lot even though I’m skeptical of the historicity of the resurrection story), but I will have no patience for Mormons using historically dubious interpretations of events as demonstrations of the superiority of their faith.

5th place (10 November 2023; 135 hits in 2024): Siri Shortcuts for updating Habitica from Apple Watch

I have bounced between three different habit trackers over the past year or so; like counting hits to my website, quantifying habit completion is one of those things that have philosophical reservations about… but still find very useful. In late 2023, I was giving Habitica another try, and although I’ve since abandoned Habitica for Finch and then Finch for Strides (which is expensive but great), I’m still really proud that I learned to do API calls (well, within Siri Shortcuts) to hack myself together some extended functionality. If memory serves, these Shortcuts got a little janky after a while, but I hope that some other folks have gotten some use out of my work here.

6th place (25 October 2021; 95 hits in 2024): 🔗 linkblog: just read ‘Bugs Bunny’s Official D&D Character Sheet Is A 15th-level Illusionist | Boing Boing’

This started getting some attention in November, and I have no idea why. I suspect that some specific Google search unearths this post somehow, but I don’t know which and don’t really have a way of finding out. This post dates from relatively early in my “linkblogging,” after I figured out how to get Siri Shortcuts to retrieve the titles of webpages so that I could link to and comment on articles I enjoyed reading.

7th place (11 September 2024; 88 hits in 2024): the new Reeder is exactly the app I want right now

I knew early on that the new Reeder app for iOS or macOS was going to be a favorite for consuming content from RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, YouTube, and elsewhere, so I wanted to write a positive review in the hopes that it would encourage other people to look into it. Here’s hoping for the emergence of more apps like this—and for continued development of this one

8th place (1 October 2022; 87 hits in 2024): the problem with Gadianton robber rhetoric

This was a hastily written post about a particular term in the Book of Mormon that gets used by Book of Mormon readers to condemn folks they don’t agree with. It was inspired by an observation from a book I was reading at the time that reminded me of another book that I enjoyed. I don’t know why it got this attention in 2024 (perhaps because The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints studied the Book of Mormon in its Sunday School curriculum this year?.

I think the post is fine, I wish I had been more careful with it. In October, I was at a conference where I got to hear some scholars talk about Mormon appropriation of Indigenous American identity into their own beliefs, and that got me thinking that I need to do more reading and listening in that area. I imagine I might write the post differently after doing more of that homework.

9th place (16 June 2022, 70 hits in 2024): embedding Hypothesis as a commenting system on Hugo static sites

This is another older post, dating back to my big website/social media refresh in the summer of 2022. It’s also another “here’s how I hack together my website” post, and it’s a more helpful one than my “POSSE microblogging” post, and so I’m thrilled that it’s getting hits. Appropriately enough, I think it also has more Hypothesis comments than any of the other pages on my website.

10th place (7 March 2024; 42 hits in 2024): more thoughts on Kirtland (with gratitude for Lach Mackay)

This is another Kirtland Temple post. It’s a reflection on how the Kirtland Temple symbolized my transition into Community of Christ and how that made the Temple sale difficult but also a note of appreciation for Lach Mackay, who helped make the Kirtland Temple a symbol of my transition into Community of Christ and whose involvement in the Temple sale helped me be okay with it.

Conclusion

I mentioned when writing about the CV page on my website that one of the main reasons for keeping up a website has been as part of my online professional presence. It’s interesting, then, that my most-visited posts in 2024 so clearly cluster around my religious writing and my “look what I can do when I push my technical skills to the limit” posts.

I’m not in a rush to draw too many conclusions from this exercise, but it is interesting, and I’m glad that services like Tinylytics exist to provide some basic analytics without being super creepy about data collection.

• analytics
• blogging
• Kirtland Temple
• POSSE
• Hugo
• Siri Shortcuts
• Hypothesis