Happy Birthday, Guild Review!

Believe it or not, it was a year ago today - the Feast of St. Lawrence - that the Guild Review was born.

In the past year we've had 157 posts discussing a variety of questions regarding academia, art, cinema, economics, faith, history, music, philosophy and politics. We've learned about the advantages and disadvantages of the enthymeme, considered the difficulties and joys of Johannes Brahms, and juxtaposed Nietzsche and Mother's Day. That's a lot of ground to cover in a single year.

Since last August we've had over 3,000 visits by more than 1,200 unique visitors, and that doesn't include data from the period when the internet goblins were obstructing the tubes. We've had hits from 43 states, the District of Columbia and 49 foreign countries.

My sincere thanks go out to all our contributors and readers; your involvement has made this little project possible. More than that, you've made it a lot of fun. I look forward to the year to come.

Blog Features and Beirut

Friends,
Over the last few months, you may (or may not) have noticed some minor changes to the blog. On the right side you'll see that you can Subscribe to the Guild Review (with or without comments) in a variety of RSS feed readers. My favorite is Google Reader. Basically, it takes all the blogs you read and puts new posts in one place; it looks and feels a lot like an email account, and if you already have a Google account you can use the same log-in information.

And you can now join the Followers of this blog! "Now why would I do that?" you ask. Well, for one thing, it lets the world know that you read this blog. (Perhaps you're ashamed of us, but we're proud of all our readers and would be happy to have your imprimatur.) Moreover, it helps people navigate the blogosphere by seeing what blogs their fellow blog readers are reading. Finally, depending on your feed reader, it can make subscribing to our posts even easier!

You'll also list of recent posts from various Blogs That We Read. The Guild Review is not responsible for this content, but if you enjoy what you read here, you'll probably enjoy some of these too. Like a recent post by Santiago Ramos on the Image blog about the band Beirut (which we've discussed before) and the phenomenon of Americans traveling abroad.

Alas, the latest statistics on blog readership have been garbled by the trolls that inhabit the internets, but the indications are a gentle rise above past figures.

As always, many thanks to our contributors and readers!

~Aaron

More Boring Numbers...

Back in December I shared some boring numbers about statistics for this blog. Those covered about the first four months of the blog's life. In the five months since then we've had 1,519 visits to the blog and 2,278 pageviews. Among the hits have been 689 new unique visitors. The geographic reach has spread to 32 new foreign countries, putting us up to a total of 48, on every (inhabited) continent. In addition, we've upped our state count by nine states to 38, as well as the District of Columbia. Admittedly, some of those have been bots or people who didn't care, but those are still some impressive numbers. So thanks to all of our readers, particularly those of you who have shared this blog with your family and friends.

Some Boring Numbers...

Just thought I'd mention that since this blog began in August we've had 838 visits (1,344 pageviews) from 300 unique visitors from twenty-nine states, the District of Columbia and sixteen foreign countries (well, if you count China and Taiwan separately) on four continents. And that's not even counting the folks who read The Guild Review through Google Reader or other feed services. So thanks to all our readers!