Gadgetopia

Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that’s very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site.

Interestingly, we hit 2,500 posts exactly one year ago today. That means our daily post count is about 4.1 (almost 6 without weekends). This means we’ll hit 5,000 posts early next spring, which is always what I figured. We’ll have some contest or something when that happens and hopefully give some stuff away.

So as long as we’re celebrating a blog posting, here’s a list of some of the best and more interesting posts of the last 4,000:

Most Commented Posts

• Our post about Fake Escrow Sites (which spawned its own site which has been pretty quiet) got 152 comments
• The famous Bill Gates philanthropy post at 108.

Both posts have had their comments shut down since. The Bill Gates post was the first post I ever did this on — in fact, I had to go look up the exact template tags to do it.

When this site was deanebarker.net, there was actually a post about politics that got over 300 comments. (Although that’s cool, about every post at Rosie O’Donnell’s site gets over 300 comments — this one got almost 2,000 comments, in fact. You see, that’s the trick to getting a lot of comments — become a famous lesbian.)

Longest Posts

• The Josh Clark interview, at over 5,000 words, is the longest. But that doesn’t really count, since I didn’t write most of it.
• This article on Web usability that I wrote back in 2000 (and published in 2003) is the next longest (read it with a grain of salt, remembering it was written five years ago, which is 100 years ago in Net time).
• Third place is the The Building of Basecamp Review.

Shortest Posts

• The Geek Test at 77 characters
• The recent post on Google Site Seeing at 84 characters (Dave is a man of few words, it turns out).

Posts With the Most Prominent Links

• Two entries — RSS for Credit Card Activity and Styling RSS Feeds — got linked to from Scripting News on consecutive days.
• Three entries — the legendary Bill Gates, Philanthropist post, this one about spilled ketchup from earlier today, and one other one which I forget — got linked to from Boing Boing.
• The Building of Basecamp Review got a link from Kottke.
• Dave had a couple linked to from AppleInsider and MacInTouch, but I can’t remember which ones (sorry, Dave).

Any one of those links mentioned is worth 5,000 page views, easily.

My Favorite Posts

• Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning, about the hazards of shiny objects, was probably linked to from more sites around the Net than any other. It’s still just as true today as it was when I wrote it. (Every time Joe wants me to try Rails, I should have him go read this post.)
• Content Management as a Marriage is very similar, and I find myself nodding in agreement everytime I read it again.
• This post about (and called) Open and Closed Content Management is another good one that expresses the thought I was getting at awfully well. Additionally, the comments on this post introduced me to ez publish which means that I never have to write another content management system, which is cool.
• These two: Enterprise Architecture: Top-Down Makes My Head Hurt and Problems No Platform Will Fix, are pretty similar and I believe in them more and more every day.
• Smarty as a Sub Language is the post that most makes me wanna crack open a code editor.
• Adding User Defined Fields in Movable Type was probably my best technical contribution to the blogosphere. However, Joe’s JavaScript Autocomplete/Intellisense post will likely eclipse this as he’s already received a couple rounds of fantastic contributions from people.
• This post announcing the birth of my second daughter (third child overall) was also awesome for obvious reasons.

Most Glaring Example That The World Is Ending
Some of the comments on this post, easily. I mean, come on people — do I have to spoon feed the sarcasm?

The Post Most Likely To Get Me Sued
I’ve been watching the comments on the Geek Squad post pretty carefully. Nothing has gotten out of hand, and there’s a lot of good discussion going on, so I’m keeping my hands off for now. However, it still makes me a little nervous.

Only Post I’ve Ever Been Threatened About
There were some comments on this post about Convea that I was asked to take down under threat of “legal action.” I’m still bitter about it, but I wussed out and folded.

(Some long-time readers will remember that this site came down for six weeks in early 2003 when I was threatened over another post, but it was a completely different site back then, so that doesn’t really count. And I deserved that one.)

Posts That Bummed Me Out The Most
Two of them, actually — both pretty recent.

• The comments of this one about the new design
• The comments on this one that accused me of tricking people into clicking on AdSense links.

Both sucked, but they are what they are. People have every right to express their opinions.

Most Pissed Off I’ve Been While Writing A Post
This one, about the comment spammer. That’s also the closest we’ve come to getting taken offline.

Post Containing the Most Hyperlinks
This one. There’s 40 of them in here. Markdown rules.

So, what’s next? Some ideas for the future:

Ask Gadgetopia
I’d like to provide a place for readers to ask questions of the community that’s built-up around this site. Not specific “debug my code” questions, but general questions about the best way to do something. There’s a lot of knowledge out there I know some people would like to tap.

Reader Survey
We did a survey a long time ago. I’d like to do another one to find out who’s reading. Total vanity, but still.

Let’s Give Stuff Away…
I’m getting an increasing number of people offering me review copies of stuff (software, games, books…) in exchange for some publicity. I’ve started asking for two copies: one for me to review, and one for me to give away to someone. However, I can’t figure out a good way to give the stuff away.

Let’s Go Somewhere…
I’d like to send Dave or Rob to MacWorld, or me or Joe on this PHP cruise. I’d need to know, however, that we can provide some unique value. A lot of sites send people to these things — can we provide something different enough to make it worthwhile?

So, that’s it. I’m sure I’ll forget about post #4,500, so I’ll see you number 5,000. I’ll be here — I hope you will too.