Five hundred posts is enough time to get a feel as to that concerns that a blog addresses in some kind of rough proportion, as well as a suitable milestone to stop and examine whether this blog has gone along according to my expectations to write a blog related to my view of history (especially biblical history) and culture, along with book reviews and other features. Additionally, it offers a chance to comment upon those aspects of the blog that have been most popular through a variety of means. For one, let us look at some of the thresholds that posts have reached. For example, 22 posts have reached 100 unique page views so far since this blog started on November 18, 2010. Most of these posts deal with the Church of God, but one of them is part of my series on the Sons of Korah (the personal profile of Heman the Ezrahite), two of them deal with Somaliland, another looks at my Strengths Finder Report, another deals with the surrender of the Army of the Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, and another deals with the problem of legitimacy in Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna. The wide variety of popular posts suggests the wide variety of material that is present in this blog, despite the fact that posts on disputes within the Church of God appear (lamentably) to be the most popular material I write about.

As the total number of pages on the blog is 502 after this one (including the two pages at the top of the screen), the average number of posts for each page so far is about 42.89 at the time of writing. That means that over the lifetime of the blog so far the average post has contributed about 43 views to either the “home page” or one of the information pages at the top of the blog as well as its own content specifically. Given the fact that I blog about a lot of obscure matters (ranging from ancient timetelling devices like the Antikythera Mechanism) or obscure people and events and nations, this is a higher average than I initially expected.

One area that I have been disappointed in is the lack of comments. As of writing there are around 415 or so comments approved on the blog or the 500 blog entries, including my own replies and pingbacks from the links within blogs. This has been disappointing, as I hoped that people would be willing and interested in engaging me directly in communication. Though that number would be greatly increased if one included Facebook links, I have been disappointed by the lack of direct communication with the author that has resulted from my blog entries. I would much rather, personally, be a congenial and talkative friend at a dinner party than a voice crying aloud in the wilderness.

So far the site has seventeen subscribers, which pleases me because that means that 17 people like me enough to want my blog entries in their inbox two or three times daily, which given the length of my blogs and the amount of time it takes for most people to read my material, is a significant sign of interest. Sixty-one times (so far) someone has shared a blog entry of mine through e-mail, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Digg, or Reddit. Those entries that have been shared multiple times include “Facing The Grim Arithmetic,” my most popular blog entry in terms of views, “An Introduction of Sorts,” “When They Ask Us Why,” a post written by a friend of mine, “Syria Joins The Club,” a book review on the book, “Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr,” neither of which has gotten a lot of views comparatively, and “There Remains Therefore A Sabbath Rest For The People of God,” and “You Shall Not Revile God Nor Curse A Ruler Of Your People,” both dealing with biblical passage commentaries.

Among the 23 categories of my blog, there are some categories (most entries have more than one) that are particularly well-populated: musings (330 entries), history (301 entries), and Christianity (253 entries). Some tags are also extremely commonly used, including Christianity (203 posts), culture (163 posts), Bible (107 posts), authority (62 posts), civil war (59 posts), ancient history (55 posts), Judaism (55 posts), politics (54 post), biblical history (51 posts), Church of God (51 posts), legitimacy (49 posts), cogwa (45 posts), law (45 posts), music (45 posts), military history (44 posts), to give a few examples. Overall, I would say that the blog does appear to have attracted an audience bigger than I would expect given my total lack of promotion and marketing skills and my no-frills approach to blogging–providing text and only very rarely any kind of pictures or supporting graphics. I’m really a no-frills kind of person, though, except in my descriptive language. I would like to inspire a little more conversation on this blog, but I’m not sure how to do so. Other than that, though, this blogging experience has been more pleasant than some of my other blogs to date.