Popularity is such a fleeting and fickle creature. But in honour of our nearly-one-full-year of publication, we wanted to provide a round-up of the content readers have enjoyed the most. So how do we measure our most popular posts? We couldn’t decide on a single method, so we used several, including number of comments, number of views, and search engine metrics. Here they are!
Food
Our posts on food seem to be the most popular. Yes: we’re surprised about this too. Or, actually, we’re only surprised about the particulars. Organic searches (i.e., from people looking for stuff on the web) regularly rank our posts on eel pie from London and brown cheese and waffles from Oslo in Google’s top ten for those search terms. In a slightly more appealing vein, regular readers love the description of our birthday blowout meal at Lysverket and our posts on Turkish meze and Cypriot fish meze. And among our own recipes, Turkish lentil soup is the hands-down favourite.
Chucking It and Practicalities
The post about selling our books is a perennial favourite. And people seem to love reading about our minimalist travel wardrobe, and also about our continual shedding of further things. Our very first post explains it all, so people often read that one too. We’ve received lots of emails about our ongoing series about how you too can chuck it all and meander around the world: the most recent post, on languages, links to the whole series. And we’re just about to get into the nitty-gritty of budgeting, so look out for more in this series coming soon.
Life on the Road and Culture
Our post on Turkish TV gets a lot of traffic too, very probably it mentions the word porn. (Hey; this is the internet, after all!). Each of our posts about where we live now: Oxford, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Istanbul, Limassol, Mindelo, and Rome is popular, even after we don’t live there any more. The description of our Oslo neighbourhood, Grünerløkka, also receives a fair bit of love. The post on Finnish design garnered a number of emails, and our Finnish sauna and Turkish bath visits did too. And, finally, people reacted favorably to our mosque etiquette post and to the news of John’s haircuts.
Traveller’s Tales
Our two stories about India, John’s massage, and the night bus, are our most popular posts in this category. But the ignominious tale of Laurel’s abandonment of her backpack is a close third.
There you have it, our most popular posts! Thanks for following along with us, and here’s to another year of meandering minimally.
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