I've made 70 posts this year, most of which contain very little original material.

Apparently I've had 155,081 visits to this site in the past year, made by no more than 59,474 visitors. It makes me really happy to know that tens of thousands of people are clinging onto my every word... Or not. Most of those are probably robots and spam-bots, and the serious readers of this blog will have probably have read the posts through something like Google Reader—or some other method available through clicking on the "subscribe" link to the right—and these don't show up on the number of vist(or)s.

But here are some other stats that may be slightly more meaningful.

Over the year, I've had 336 clicks from Twitterfeed. Probably this captures most of the traffic to my blog from Twitter. This demonstrates my ability to deceive people into clicking on a link. Here are the top five (not that my best posts are necessarily the most-read ones; these are just the ones that caused the biggest stir at the time):

1. Coalition For Marriage: an open letter to fellow Christians, 108 clicks
2. Is it un-Green to oppose same-sex marriage? 30 clicks
3. Why work? 22 clicks
4. John Stevens on baptism, 18 clicks
5. Why Christians should be environmentalists, 14 clicks

Slightly more useful would be the number of comments I've received. Most people who leave a comment have at least read a few sentences of what I write. In fact, the standard of comments left here is remarkably high, compared with the more, well, popular regions of the internet.

Bear in mind that probably almost half of the comments on my blog are my own (generally in response to comments by other people, I should add), so you might want to divide these numbers in half for a more representative figure...

Also bear in mind that the ability to write things that generate comments is not the same as the ability to write things that are worth reading. Most comments are of the "What a load of rubbish!" variety, rather than the "Thanks, I'm glad I read that!" variety.

My posts in 2012 generated a total of 253 comments. Top five posts:

1. John Stevens on baptism, 31 comments
2. Global warming sceptics convinced, 22 comments (one sceptic wasn't convinced!)
3. A biblical case for female pastors? 19 comments
4. Should infants be baptised? 17 comments
5. =Coalition For Marriage: an open letter to fellow Christians, 15 comments
   =Can infants be baptised? 15 comments

Plus a few comments on Facebook, which would take far too long to count up.

Perhaps what I'm trying to write is a list of my best posts, but that would require me to read them all, and I've got far better things to do with my time. Probably you have too!

Happy New Year for tomorrow, to (both) my loyal readers!

[old bits snipped]

In case you suddenly fear you'll be missing out, "my research in astronomy" roughly translates as "how I finally persuaded the computer to do X, and why in hindsight X is pointless and I should have made the computer do Y instead".

For those of you still in the dark, René Magritte, a Beligan surrealist artist, painted La trahison des images (The Treachery Of Images) in the 1920s. Underneath a picture of a pipe he painted the words, Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe).

I became familiar with this work not through my extensive knowledge of Belgian art, but through the quite remarkable Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Why not order a copy now instead of reading blogs?

I don't want to start writing a blog (I'll explain why in my next post - d'oh!), so I maintain that this is not a blog. But it does use some really useful blogging technology, such as RSS feeds.

Feeds such as RSS or Atom enable you to keep track of updates to web sites without having to visit them individually. I use Bloglines.com for this. Most days I check my Bloglines page and it tells me about the latest news stories (on BBC News and others), articles on various science pages and updates to various friends' web sites - oh, and the latest Dilbert strip, of course. So, rather than checking 30 or so web sites for updates, I need to check only one. And if I'm offline for a week, it will remember what I have read and what I haven't read, so I don't even need to check every day.

There we are. Sign up with Bloglines, add this page to your list of feeds, and it will watch my site day and night for any updates!