And taking the top spot… | Photo: Charlotte Video Project, CC BY 3.0
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I just noticed that according to the WordPress backend we’re running this site on, yesterday’s post was the 500th post on here. Since we started, we’ve had nearly 65,000 page views and now average 1000-2000 monthly visitors, and we’ve taken this site from a totally and completely unheard-of blog to an only moderately unheard-of blog — all thanks to you, our lovely readers! So to celebrate, we’re recapping the top five posts as selected by random hordes on the interwebs and recorded by Google Analytics. Let’s revisit the five most popular posts in the first five hundred!
#5. Thursday, September 10, 2015: A Cutaway of the Vought Corsair (2063 visitors)
After posting another cutaway of the Vought Corsair, by G. William Patten, and getting some positive feedback, I stuck this one up by Tom Smith Roots. Both men worked for Chance Vought back when everything was hand-drawn and schematics looked like art.
#4. Tuesday, June 2, 2015: Skeptical Tuesdays: Dryer Sheets (3082 visitors)
In which I responded to a terribly frustrating meme about that “fresh laundry scent” giving you cancer (hint: it doesn’t). You can go back to using dryer sheets now if you want smelly laundry.
#3. Thursday, April 14, 2016: Damnit, De Niro, I Thought We Were Good (3271 visitors)
Caught up in the controversy of nearly showing, then not showing, the Andrew Wakefield quackumentary “Vaxxed” at the Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Nero went on the Today Show and did some… talking.
#2. Tuesday, August 11, 2015: Skeptical Tuesdays: Look Before You Like (3648 visitors)
Sharing a meme can be a little dangerous if you don’t do a little homework first. I discovered that when I realized that a quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that looked like it was about fighting “big media” was actually about how certain Russians weren’t Russians because they were Jews. Yeah.
And in the top spot we have:
#1. Friday, April 10, 2015: Vani Hari and the Definition of Sexism (3814 visitors)
The most visited post ever on this site was written by our Feminist Friday correspondent Elle Irise, and was about the fact that — while we must remain vigilant in our quest to fight sexism — we can all rest safe in the knowledge that the reason we think Vani Hari isn’t worth listening to isn’t that she’s female, it’s that she’s so very wrong, so very, very often.
In retrospect, all of them found their way onto reddit, so if you ever read something here and you think it needs to be read by more people, I think we all know where you need to paste the link. Thanks for a great 500!
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Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.