Happy Blogoversary!

February 12th, 2008.  The Phytophactor Blog was born 10 years ago and now some 2900+ blog posts later The Phytophactor still labors on. This is actually pretty hard to believe. The blog started off rather slowly, and early on, for the first couple of years, the Blog didn’t manage to keep any stats, so who knows how many people came and went in those days, it was not a large number.  The visibility and readership volume improved greatly after joining the Field of Science collective.  The number of page reads is well over 1.5 million, and the blog gets some 500 to 700 visits a day. The all-time most popular blog post is whether the artichoke is a fruit or a vegetable, published in the 1st month of the blog's existence.  So it is also old, and in the old, harder to read, small font.  Altogether that short little blog accounts for just over 10% of this blog’s total traffic.  People also care about whether flowering kale can be eaten (yes) and if pollen is equivalent to sperm (no).  Who knew those were such  pressing questions?  The Friday Fabulous Flower is the most popular and basically only regular feature.  This blog doesn’t stimulate much in the way of comments, so it is hard to tell  what people like, or don’t like.  As the national news has gotten so depressing TPP has blogged about it less, and similarly, when your academic counter part retires, you find you don’t follow the academic life so much.  So those areas get less coverage than they once did or the get covered less frequently than before.  But the botany and the gardening carry on.  Careful readers probably can list TPP's favorite house and garden plants because of the number of times they have been featured, and gardening pet peeves (poodle pruning of shrubs). 
Today is also Charles Darwin's and Abraham Lincoln's Birthday (in the same year), and much more recently TPP's kid sister's birthday.  Congratulations to all.