Blog celebrates three-year anniversary today with 1,880th post

As hard as it is to believe, I started this blog three years ago today. In other words, Happy Birthday to “Dispatches from the LP-OP”!

The blog went through a couple of name changes in its early days, and I’ve missed a day or two along the way, but all and all, I missed very few days thanks to my somewhat obsessive-compulsive personality.

One of the cool things about having a blog through Blogger is that you can monitor the traffic to your blog from behind the scenes.

According to my blog’s stats page, it has been viewed 96,907 times during the past three years. That breaks down to about 2,692 page views per month or about 621 page views per week. Over the past three years, I posted 1,879 blog entries, and most of them (aside from my daily weather observations) were about 500 words long.

The Top 10 posts of the past three years, ranked by number of page views, are as follows:

1. Amp Energy drink lacks punch of Monster – April 19, 2010 (2,960 views)

2. Moosehead Lager – so tasty that its theft has been the subject of books - Dec. 10, 2010 (1,384 views)

3. Outside Magazine’s Best Documentary Film List – Oct. 14, 2010 (412 views)

4. My movie picks this week are ‘The Rum Diary’ and ‘Captain America’ – Oct. 26, 2011 (355 views)

5. My movie picks this week are ‘Fast Five’ and ‘3 Idiots’ – April 27, 2011 (295 views)

6. Kick off the new year by writing your own ‘bucket list’ – Jan. 1, 2013 (293 views)

7. Which Clive Cussler book is your all-time favorite? – May 9, 2011 (291 views)

8. NG’s 100 Best Adventure Books – April 17, 2010 (259 views)

9. ‘Ghost Hunters’ visit Pennhurst Asylum in last night’s new episode – March 3, 2011 (237 views)

10. What do YOU think about TIME’s ‘Top 10 Everything of 2012’? – Dec. 11, 2012 (233 views)

The stats page also tells me where visitors to my blog live. While the vast majority of them live in the U.S., most of the other visitors hailed from Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, the Netherlands, Canada, France, India, Hong Kong and Australia.

I look forward to keeping the blog going for as long as I can, and I hope to live up to what I said I hoped to accomplish in that first blog post three years ago today:

“The main purpose of this new blog is to help me keep and maintain the meager writing skills that I have and journalistically document some of my new experiences. I hope you’ll find it interesting.

“My intention is to keep the content light-hearted and informative, and I hope it’ll encourage others to have and share their own experiences. When I speak of new experiences I’m talking about meeting people I’ve never met before, going places I’ve never gone and doing things that I’ve never done. Much of what you’ll find here will be information about new books that I’ve read, restaurants I’ve never visited, celebrities that I happen to meet (if any), food I’ve never tried, events I’ve never attended (like festivals and sporting events), places (like state parks and hiking trails) and movies I’ve seen for the first time.

“You’ll also find that I’m big on lists. I’ve always been drawn to ‘bucket lists,’ top 10 lists of things to do, go, eat and see, as well as recommended reading lists and best-of lists. If you run across any lists like these, feel free to share them.

“In the end, I hope that none of you find this blog to be boring or too self-indulgent. If so, then I’ve failed in what I’ve set out to do, and I’ll need to tighten up.”