100,000 Views

A quiet landmark passed by on this blog a few moments ago ... our 100,000th unique page view.  It's wonderful to think of that many views, not to mention comments (660 of them) made since we launched on February 20th, 2009.  100,000 feels like a real achievement -- well, ok, there's a blog on alien mummies that boasts of 100,000 views a month! -- but I'll take the Arctic over aliens any day.

Some other stats on the site: our viewership is broad and international: there were 13,873 views from Canada, 12,007 from the UK, 6,911 from Australia, 6,148 from Germany, 1,128 from France and 763 from Spain. Mac users make up a healthy 20% of all views, but there are also nearly a thousand Linux users and 526 who somehow managed to view the site on their BlackBerry. And what were the most popular posts?  #1 was on Sir Edwin Landseer's painting, "Man Proposes, God Disposes"; #2 was "Who Discovered the Northwest Passage"; #3 was on the Peglar Papers, and #4 was my friend Joe O'Farrell's fascinating post on the possibility that the Erebus and Terror were frozen into an iceberg, and indeed seen by eyewitnesses before drifting off to sea.

For all who have joined me on this voyage, I'm deeply grateful -- and I hope I'll be able to keep the quality and interest of the blog as high over the next three years as it was over the last three.