Recent Events of no particular note

With the possibility being the TPP's mind is beginning to skip a cog, a number of recent events have just slipped right by.  Back in early Feb. while the Phactors were still in Hawaii, TPP completed his 9th year of blogging.  Well over a million and a quarter page reads later, the blog is still plodding along. This seems to be a good thing.  Good thing TPP blogged about artichokes once; it accounts for about 20% of all my hits!
Just 2 days ago was Pi day (3/14) and TPP forgot to mention it.  To make up for this omission, here's a link to an extremely clever pie for pi in the form of a zoetrope.  Got you to look it up?  TPP just played with one at the George Eastman House museum this past summer. Please don't say you have to look up George Eastman?  But the video did not explain why the pie was pecan.
TPP often blogs about the first flower of spring, but it was hard to determine just what and when that was because of the early spring.
TPP was going to brag about a local trivia contest won by his namesake team, but really it was the F1's effort and trivia- filled mind that did the trick, that and a bunch of friends whose minds are filled with strange stuff.  

Uh oh! Missed my anniversary!

No, TPP isn't in trouble because it wasn't THAT anniversary for which there are usually many hints.  The Phytophactor blog was started on February 12th in 2008, so it's 5th anniversary just passed.  What can be said?  The blogging just keeps plugging along at a rate of not quite one a day for a total of almost 1600 blogs.  A blog written just 9 days after TPP began blogging remains the most read blog by a factor of about 5, of course it's had lots of time to accumulate page hits.  Who knew so many people wondered about whether an artichoke was a fruit or a vegetable?  Nature blogs network records the traffic from 2371 nature related blogs, and according to their records, TPP is 157th overall and 8th among plant-related blogs (and it was higher; damned birder blogs!).  The total number of page views is hard to figure out because my stats don't go back to the beginning, and there was a period of outage, and different places all record rather different data, but the 500,000 mark is not far away.  The good news is that TPP is still having fun, and hopefully y'all are too.  But still no entries in the Winter Mix cocktail contest!  Let's go people!     

Four years of the Phytophactor

There was a lot going on Feb. 12, 2012: Darwin Day, Lincoln’s birthday, oh, and my kid sister’s birthday too. Hmm, she is the youngest of the three. So with all those things going on somehow the Phactor slipped right by the 4th anniversary of this blog. Let’s check in and see where we were and where we be. Well, a year ago, for the 3d anniversary, this blog had just passed its 600th post, and during the last 12 months almost another 600 posts were made, and at present the Phytophactor stands just short of 1200 published posts.  A year ago, this blog was averaging about 150 hits per day, which was about three times the readership at the time of the 2nd anniversary. At present readership is running well over 600 hits per day, and still increasing.  March will probably record more than 20,000 hits, and you will notice no tacky ads in the side bars either. This year's increase was the result of joining Fields of Science collective in August. According to the Nature Blogs Network, the Phytophactor presently ranks 9th among plant-related blogs, around 100th out of all the nearly 2000 nature blogs they record traffic for.
One year ago marked the addition of the 50th Phactor Phollower, and as of today there are 93, not quite doubled in the past year. The Phactor remains grateful and flattered that so many disturbed and desperate people are out there. And it remains very positive that new Phollowers are still adding themselves faster than the old ones are dying. Good going people!
Not everything is necessarily better. With less time to spend, the blogs have gotten shorter, simpler. But this is not because the Phactor has not been writing. During the past 12 months he has co-authored 3 scientific manuscripts, 2 published, 1 still in press, and the book is nearing completion.  For some reason my university gives credit for that writing, but not for this.  What's wrong with them?  After all how many people have read my last scientific paper?  It'll be fewer than read this.  This year the Phactor was fairly religious about the Friday Fabulous Flower.  So this still remains an amusing activity, so the Phactor will keep blogging away, even if artichokes remains the most read blog!  Thanks for all your support and comments, although that remains the one area where the rate has not gone up.