9,000 Hits!

Like a professional boxer in the middle of a good career, this humble little blog has landed over 9,000 hits. I remember a time when I'd wait expectantly for just one more visitor to boost our hit total into the next thousand, reloading the page every 10 minutes or so; this time, we were a few dozen hits over 9,000 before I realized we had reached another milestone.

So this is what it feels like to be popular.

Why, come to think of it, exactly one year ago today (if you're reading this on Sunday), we were celebrating 100 hits. In one year, we've increased from 100 hits a month to 1,000 hits a month. That's, like, at least twice as many hits! Truly, ours is the mightiest of blogs.

Here's something that's equally astounding that I recently discovered: We have written a lot for this blog.

I knew we had enough material to fill a book, and perhaps so much that a little bit of selective trimming was necessary, but I was stunned when I started assembling all our posts in Word document format and tried to send some of them to Alex for review. Sending my e-mail took an unreasonable amount of time, considering there were barely over two months' worth of posting attached.

Then I looked at the page count.

Then I looked at the page count for all the other months.

Then I did a little bit of math.

Then I nearly fell over: In raw manuscript format, without any formatting or trimming or editing, we have just shy of 800 pages of posts from this blog.

EIGHT. HUNDRED. PAGES.

Even cutting out photos and posting dates, that's still gotta be somewhere in the 500s or 600s. I can't begin to fathom how many hours and days and weeks we must have devoted to writing that much. Naturally, if we're going to compile our blog posts into a book, we've got to surgically remove all the unhealthy filler posts, and all the posts that just don't hold up in book format.

For example, I'd feel personally responsible for the senseless murder of a tree to provide paper for this post. Now, the post isn't a total waste of one's blog-reading time because it's got an animated .gif of Sonic the Hedgehog tapping his foot impatiently, but I can't see any redeeming value of that post in book format, unless we can produce one of those nifty holograms that makes it look like Sonic is tapping his foot when you tilt the book back and forth.

Nottt gonna happen.

For me, at least, it's been a strange process to trim down the number of my posts that I'll be including in the book compilation. There are plenty of perfectly good posts that I've needed to cut out because we're too cheap to give our made-of-paper book the ability to connect to the Internet. Links posts, no matter how informative, funny, or eloquent, simply don't work if there's nothing to link to. And we are not making this blog into a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

If you want to read the 125-page story conference transcript of Raiders of the Lost Ark, go to page 421.

If you want to read someone else's more interesting and better-written blog post about Raiders of the Lost Ark, go to page 1138.

If you want to look at a picture of a guy getting his face melted off, go to your room. You're a sick puppy, and you're grounded.