A lot of the posts that I did this year were grouped into series. Here are the main series that we looked at this year:
If you click on the series name, it will take you to the first post in the series. Enjoy this trip down memory lane!
One of the most looked at posts on this blog is one of the oldest, a post I wrote about the woman at the well in John 4. However, people don’t come looking for what I’ve written. Several times a week, someone arrives to The Kitchen having searched for “Simon Dewey” on Google. That’s because I used an illustration by Dewey to accompany that post.
Simon Dewey is a religious artist from England. His works are strongly promoted by members of the Mormon church since Dewey is himself a Mormon. Admittedly, I knew nothing about him when I chose the illustration. It’s a bit ironic that he sends more traffic to my blog than most of the things that I write.
But that’s the way it is.
OK, it’s the time of year when we’re all more focused on holiday stuff than we are blogging. Well, I guess there are a few exceptions, but I’m not one of them. Still, I thought it would be interesting this week to look back at this first year with the new look blog.
According to Google Analytics, there have been 61,110 pageviews so far this year, with 1690 different pages being viewed. They do have more helpful stats, like the fact that those are only 27,345 unique pageviews (some people looked at the same page more than once).
8,929 unique visitors made 16,176 visits. 1,262 of those visits were people coming from Facebook, though I should also count the 635 visits that came via Networked Blogs, an app on Facebook. Over half of those who visited came from a referring site.
The main blogs that sent people my way were Jay Guin’s oneinjesus.info and Rex Butts’ kingdomseeking.wordpress.com. The site religiousaffectionsministries.org sends a number of people to the site, specifically to view the series on alcohol. Same goes for forum.preacherfiles.com, though they send people for a couple of different posts.
The visitors came from 117 different countries, though the U.S. dominated by far. Australia, Canada and the U.K. followed, which seems logical. Within the U.S., Texans dominated the list, with California, Oklahoma, Florida, Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, New York and Virginia rounding out the top 10.
Those are the boring numbers! Over the next few days I’ll look back at some of the top things that people have been looking at on the site. Meanwhile, go grab some eggnog.
For years now, I’ve enjoyed receiving a rather unique devotional by e-mail, something called Thought For The Day by Alan Smith. Alan no longer publishes every day; I’m not even sure if there’s a pattern to his schedule. A few months ago, Alan established a Thought For The Day blog that mirrors the e-mail devotional.
Alan takes some of the humorous stories that float around the story and shares them with us, along with a spiritual lesson that is drawn from the joke itself. The lessons aren’t always deep, but the stories are enjoyable and it’s a nice way to turn your mind to some spiritual things.
Do yourself a favor. Go to Alan Smith’s blog and read some of the posts there. Or go to the archive of older posts. If you’d rather get Thought For The Day in your e-mail, just send an e-mail to join-thought-for-the-day@hub.xc.org.
For Books & Blogs Friday, I want to recommend that you visit the website for John Mark Hicks Ministries. I almost hesitate to refer to it as a blog, just because of the vast amount of resources available there. Sermons, journal articles, Bible classes, audio recordings… there is enough material on this site to keep you occupied for a while.
Hicks is a university professor; his About page says, “He has taught at Alabama Christian School of Religion (1982-1989), Magnolia Bible College (1989-1991), Harding University Graduate School of Religion (1991-2000 fulltime; 2000-2008 partime), and Lipscomb University (2000-2008). He has also adjuncted at Northeastern Christian College, Christian Brothers University, Abilene Christian University and Institute for Christian Theology and Minstry (St. Petersburg, Russia).” One of his specialities is church history, although he seems to “specialize” in numerous areas of biblical and theological studies.
Hicks provides well-researched, well-written, intellectually stimulating material. Even if you don’t agree with him on a certain topic, he will give you something to think about. That’s what I’m looking for when I read blogs on the Internet; I always find John Mark Hicks’ site to be worth my time.