I feel compelled to mention from time to time what this blog is and what it is not. I do not pretend or intend to be a “Durham blogger” in the sense that I will intentionally make an effort to write about Durham, local issues, or anything that might be of relevance to anyone who cares about such things. Simply put, I have a blog, and I live in Durham. It would be disingenuous to say, at this point, that I don’t consider at all whether anyone out there will find any relevance in something I post. In fact, I do presume that at least one person out there will find something amusing, interesting, or compelling about something I’ve bothered posting. That being said, I know there are posts that will be completely irrelevant to 90% of those reading this. But, hey, that’s what feed readers are for.

The label of “blogger” is an awkward one for me to embrace, because I am more or less doing what I’ve been doing for most of my life–writing stuff down. It’s only been the last few years that I’ve written stuff down such that others can stumble upon it. And it’s only been the last couple of months that I’ve writing stuff down within a framework that makes my words easy to stumble upon.

The grand irony is that those whom one would expect to know me the best–long-time friends and family–aren’t avid readers. I suspect that a couple of them might check this out from time to time, but I’ll define ‘avid’ as both checking it out and acknowledging that they check it out. Semantics aside, there are plenty in the friends and family category whom I am fairly certain have never even seen this blog.

So I don’t know what my expectation is. If a week were to go by without a comment, it might affect me. It’s one thing to write for one’s own sake, to get thoughts out and, as a bonus, connect with some people. It’s another thing to be aware that you have readers and then, one day, to find that you no longer have readers.

Anyway, I meant to offer just a short preface to what was going to be a mention of my “Top 10 Toastiest Posts” section that I’ve had on the page for a few weeks. I’m manually generating that from some website stats. I thought it would offer a new visitors a quick snapshot of what’s in here. I could’ve chosen posts that I thought were representative and flattering, but I think the method I went with–pure hit counts–creates a diverse list, and it includes plenty of posts that I’m honestly not very proud of but nonetheless wrote for the world to see. I wondered if there’d be a chicken-egg issue here, as posts I list here are more liable to remain as most-visited posts, but I think that’s how popularity of anything works. Incumbency is a tough quality for a competitor to overcome. (Odd analogy, I know, but I think it somewhat works…)