Top 10 Posts of 2012

Jan 2, 2013 | Blog

A blessed new year to all of you! Please permit me to steal borrow an idea from Lisa & Joel Schmidt's wonderful blog: a list of my top-ten most viewed posts in 2012!  However, with Lisa's encouragement I will be extending this to beyond just what's at saskapriest.com, and I'll be including my audio/video projects as well.  For the audio and video posts, I'll be looking at the number of downloads/views of the media itself, and not the blog hits.  Also note that some of the posts listed below were produced prior to 2012, but they still get a decent number of hits.  I've indicated the year of posts that were not published in 2012. Here it is: 1. Music for the new translation of the Roman Missal (blog, 2011) 2. Hot Cup of Ministry Episode #40 (May 7, 2012): Cathedral Dedication (podcast/audio) 3. The SportsFathers Episode #2 (Oct. 9, 2012): The 13th Man (sigh.) 4. Hot Cup of Ministry Episode #41 (June 1, 2012): I can see clearly now, the Visioning has come (podcast/audio) 5. Parish welcome video (includes some dog footage :-)) (YouTube) 6. Apples and Blackberries and iCloud! (Oh my!) (blog, 2011) 7. Hot Cup of Ministry Episode #38 (March 30, 2012): Lent, RCIA, et cetera. (podcast/audio) 8. Homily from Aug. 26, 2012: Another weekend, another Roughrider game… (homily/audio) 9. Homily from November 18, 2012: The world is coming to an end! (homily/audio) 10. The Pale Blue Dot: Reflection for Corpus Christi (YouTube) Looking at this, my audio/video posts are the most popular overall.  However, blog posts containing some key search terms tend to be found by a lot of people, even though the top two posts weren't written in 2012.  I should probably work on doing a few more blog posts in 2013... :-) I do see a definite payoff with video in terms of hits.  Video is the hardest to produce well, but it's worth the effort.  I produced 4 video reflections of my own and 50% of them made it to the top ten (this doesn't include videos that I produced for Tobias and Sarah Ministries - check those out! Reflection 1 and Reflection 2). Also important, however, is to not get caught up too much on stats.  First of all, it's hard to get reliable stats.  An iOS6 bug made it hard to determine the exact hits that my podcast audio received (there were thousands of 206 hits in September/October as some iOS devices downloaded LOTS of incomplete files).  And there are also a number of bot hits from China on mp3 files that I've attempted to remove from the final tally. Second, discussion about a certain post isn't necessarily reflected by the number of hits it receives.  For example, my video reflection on my 5th anniversary of the priesthood generated a good amount of (uplifting!) discussion on Facebook, even though its hit count wasn't enough for the top 10. I will end with (almost) the same question that Lisa & Joel posted on their top ten:
Questions for you readers/listeners/viewers: What’s your advice for me in my online posts? What resonates with you? Fellow bloggers/media producers, have you taken a similar inventory? What are you learning from your 2012 analysis?

Spamalot

Nov 17, 2012 | Blog

Holy spams, Batman! My websites have been hammered by spam posts in the past couple of days. Hot Cup of Ministry had over a hundred in the spam folder. Fortunately, the Akismet plugin in WordPress caught everything. Of course, with such wisdom as seen in the spam message quoted below, maybe I should let these messages through? :-)
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