Since starting this new blog format a little over two months ago, we’ve reached the 100,000 visitor milestone (with a little under a quarter of a million hits) on this site alone. Although modest in terms of other blogs, this is wildly more successful than I thought it would be, given my level of advanced crotchetiness. It took eleven days to hit 10,000, so the trend is definitely upwards. These stats do not count Leech City and Old School Tech, which are doing nicely on their own in their respective niches.

Thank you, readers, for coming here and plowing through what we have posted.

Some highlights:

• We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Wirecutter, the host of the wildly-popular million-hit-per-month Knuckledraggin blog. He has posted practically every link we’ve sent him, and has been an awesome mentor on content and the mechanics of running a blog.

• We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Concerned American at the blowtorch site (both in terms of content and hit volume) Western Rifle Shooters. He has posted a good sampling of our articles, and when he does, they explode. Years ago, he tried to get me to blog, but I didn’t have the bandwidth. He has also been very helpful in other important ways throughout the years.

• The faithless elector posts have been very popular. The Final Veil Is Falling, the start of the faithless elector series, and Breathing Room, the aftermath of the election, account for almost ten thousand each of those nearly quarter-million hits. Those are our top two posts, with three more faithless elector updates in the top ten, and my Election Day appeal to Fire the FPF showing strongly.

• As Murphy’s Law would have it, although the title is correct, the link for our top post is a typo, having “hs” instead of “is”. I originally titled it with “Has Fallen”, but that wasn’t strictly true. In the middle of changing this title, and changing the auto-generated link which does not auto-change, Ultimo, our resident adopted stray cat and criminal mind consultant, needed to be taken to the vet for her shots. Audrey walked in with Ultimo in her arms and needed help putting this claw ball into her carrier, an ill-fated enterprise. After Ultimo exploded and shot through some ceiling tiles in the industrial building we’re living in, making good her escape, I returned to my computer to finish updates, not noticing that the h was still there. I didn’t catch this oversight until after multiple blog links and hundreds of hits later, much too late to change it. You’ll find out more about Ultimo in a future article, including how she helped us design some of our physical security.

• Another strong response came to my 2016 Thanksgiving post, where I tipped the hat to our many brethren whose families have been sacrificed on the altar of go-gurrl political correctness and divorce. The outpouring of response, especially in private emails, was humbling and made me proud to know these men.

• Also in the top ten is our Introduction to Caveman Chemistry, a great book by Dr. Kevin Dunn that we use as our homeschool chemistry lab manual.

• In addition to the caveman chemistry post, several other posts in the top ten highlight the Old School Tech site, where we cover a range of practical hands-on blending of old and new tech, including our popular hurricane and off-grid solar series. We’ve deliberately kept that site non-political; it doesn’t even link back to Starving the Monkeys on ping-backs. We are happy with this family-friendly approach to that site, particularly so that homeschoolers can let their kids use that site as a resource without concern.

• Our self-sufficiency posts, overlapping with Old School Tech content, have also made the top ten, including an awesome guest post by SFC Barry with an important and informative critique of our Hurricane Matthew AAR. We’re looking forward to more guest articles, including some I’ve been sitting on by other authors that have been lost in the recent events here.

• Our Leech City posts, about the theory and practice of reining-in criminals and wayward public officials, have also had significant interest as a group. The Leech City site itself is the local public face of the overall operation, which is also a living experiment to help others learn how to apply the same techniques to their localities, with additional background information supplied here on Starving the Monkeys. We really appreciate the team of specialists in many fields who have contributed to this effort as we move into 2017, the year of pursuit.

• Other big hits are some humor pieces, including the Statesboro doughnut video, and the Pixie Mafia interview. The Pixie Mafia will be an important contributor in the future, and has already requested a follow-up. Although it never hit Starving the Monkeys, also check out the soccer mom wannabe gang moll minivan log heist post on Leech City. My Southern culture response to Wirecutter’s good-natured Baugh-busting about my chicken-eating habits was also popular.

Thanks again to everyone who has showed up here, readers, contributors and supporting bloggers all, and we’re looking forward to lots of new and interesting topics coming up, always with the goal of informing and inspiring as job #1.