My Most Popular Posts of 2011

I always find it interesting to go back and see which posts have gotten the most attention over the last year. Almost invariably, they’re posts that I never would have expected to be popular when I wrote them. Indeed, several of them are posts that hardly involved any writing at all! Humbling.

10. Why Academics Annoy People

This one surprised me a bit because it’s fairly recent and a list like this is necessarily biased toward posts that have been out a bit longer. But apparently academics annoy people enough to want to read about it a lot.

9. Put the theology book down and do something that matters

I’m quite pleased that this one made the list. It’s one of my personal favorites.

8. What is Heresy? Sugar in my coffee.

This is another one that makes me happy. The whole heresy series was a highlight of the blogging year for me.

7. How to destroy your own research paper in one simple step

This is the third one on the list that I would include among my own favorites. After this, it gets a little more interesting.

6. Free audio downloads of works by Jonathan Edwards

Apparently lots of people are looking for Jonathan Edwards resources.

5. Do you trust me?

I’m suspicious of this one. I tried to eliminate any posts that were only getting hits because of the pictures that I used. (Otherwise I’d have a couple of vampire and zombie posts on this list!) I haven’t seen the pictures on this post showing up in my search stats much, but I can’t think of any other reason it would be ranked this high. (Not that it’s a bad post; it’s just not what I’d expect to see in the top 5.)

4. Christians did not burn the library at Alexandria and other things “Agora” gets wrong

This one consistently gets a few hits every day.

3. The meaning of life according to Siri

One of my more quirky posts. Apparently anything iPhone or Apple related gets attention.

2. The 100 Most Influential People in the World?

So my #2 and #3 posts involved almost no writing on my part. Gotta love that. This post was the first time I was Freshly Pressed, which generates significant traffic for a blog like mine.

1. How to get more done by pretending you’re on an airplane

And this was the second time I got Freshly Pressed. But at least I wrote this one!

So those are my most popular posts. Tomorrow I’d like to take things in a different direction and look at the posts from the last year that are my personal favorites. Unsurprisingly, the two lists are rather different.