Looking Back: Top Posts, Stats, Pretty Tag Cloud

For InterVarsity staff, summer is a time to look back on the past academic year and prepare our plans for the coming year. I thought it might be good to do the same here on the ESN blog. Tomorrow, I’m going to ask what you think we ought to write about for the coming year, but today, I’m taking a look back.

Above: A word cloud of the ESN Blog’s most common tags, created with Wordle.

Our most popular articles over the past year reflected a variety of our top interests: graduate school, spiritual formation, living as a Christian in the academy.

1. Where did you find your megaphone? (Janine Giordano)
2. Best Books for Undergrads: Your Picks
3. Amish Grace & Pop Culture (Tom Grosh)
4. Bobby Gross: Living the Christian Year (me)
5. Keys of Thriving (Not Just Surviving) (Tom)
6. ESN Interview: Alissa Wilkinson (me)
7. On Fitting In-With the Scholarship (Janine)
8. Best Books for Graduate Students?
9. Supreme Court Rules Against CLS (me)
10. What’s the Best Way to Help Haiti? (me)

Note: These are just the most popular posts that we’ve written this past year. A few posts (What’s the purpose of the university?, Why Get a PhD in the Humanities?, Wendell Berry on the University, and Eugene Peterson on Wendell Berry) are perennial favorites.

For the past academic year (July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010), here are a few stats about the ESN blog:

Total visits	22,016
Busiest day	June 30, 2010: 209 visits
Busiest month (total)	May: 2,378 visits
Busiest month (average)	February: 82 visits per day
Avg. daily visits in July 2009	53
Avg. daily visits in June 2010	69
RSS subscribers	185 (avg. for past week)

Tomorrow, I’ll be asking you what you think we ought to write about for the coming year. I look forward to hearing what you think!