Popular Blog Topics

As years go on I've collected a solid amount of personally written blog posts. These posts have all been written without AI and without a single sponsored post. So when I look at roughly 400 blog posts I'm surprised when I look at Google Search Insights & GoAccess what seems to the most popular.

With roughly 1GB of NGINX logs I dispatched goaccess to build an HTML report for me to review. Parsing at roughly 60,000 lines per second it took this script about an hour to rip through all my traffic.

At this moment my most popular post is "Understanding Matrix Resurrections" which is crazy because the 1st iteration of that blog post was "Understanding The Matrix Trilogy" that was also pretty popular. I guess folks love hearing other's interpretation of movies that don't exactly spell everything out for you. I was less thrilled with the 4th movie, but the first three movies are up there with my favorite movies of all time.

Closely following is "Someone is pretending to be me" post which clocked the most hits in 24 hours of any other blog at around 100,000 unique readers. At this point 3 years after that post that blog has 222,605 unique IPs visiting it - so roughly 120,000 more readers after the initial release day.

The 3rd most visited post is finally a post I spent a lot of time on and anticipated it growing in popularity as I released more parts of it. This was the Cicada 3301 Puzzle 3 Part 1 puzzle. When I was heavily researching Cicada I was surprised to see most existing content involving Puzzle 3 to be quite sparse. Often a post would take a step from A to B without explaining how any of that occurred.

So I wanted to do something different. I wanted to solve every single puzzle from start to finish solving them my own way with scripts I wrote. Additionally including the steps I took between any sort of confusing process. By not relying on existing solutions I ended up solving puzzles that only had partially redacted solves public so it was fun to contribute back full solves to the community.

The next post was a short post titled "Open Source & Saying No" and this post excelled in popularity for being another post to rise to the top of Hacker News. It seems folks felt in agreement that most GitHub projects grow a bit larger than they should which leads to eventual burn out.

Finally before I look at Google Insights the 5th most viewed blog was "The disappointing tea.xyz" and clearly a pattern has developed. This was another post that was on the top of Hacker News which I only wrote fueled with anger as someone affected by the spam caused by this Web3 project.

So 3 out of 5 blogs in my most visited were at some point on the top of Hacker News which I guess proves that a bit of viral outreach is a large contributor of hits to my blog.

Google Insights is a different approach that only tracks inbound hits via Google so this will be more of insights of how Googling my content goes. Right out of the gate I'm happy to see that most of my Cicada blog posts are top content via Google searches. Each of those posts take me a solid amount of time to write so seeing folks benefit from them is happy to see.

Another post I'm happy to see getting traffic is "Predatory iOS Cleanup Applications" because finding my grandma with two of those weekly paid applications on her phone was a surprise. There is a market of applications that abuse permissions, pricing and then prey on the ill-formed and it bugs me. It bugs me a lot because during submission of real legitimate applications I have to defend the dumbest rejections from Apple staff reviewers so I'm ultimately perplexed how any of the applications I researched were allowed on the store.

After realizing I was paying $100/month for Internet when my plan was $44/month a few years ago I finally did the painful act of sitting on the phone with different departments to get my bill reduced. I'm not sure why Frontier is allowed to just increase your price every so often for no reason, but a simple phone call and they put it back to normal. It almost suggests that once again they prey on the busy or ill-formed to capture extra revenue so in the midst of anger I wrote "Watching your Frontier bill slowly rise".

Finally two posts I'm excited to see getting popular is when I researched all those letters I got in the mail after moving in. Clearly a ton of companies review loan information in order to use it as an opportunity to scam new home owners. I did a deep dive on this scam and explained how it really worked and blogged about it. I guess people are searching the phrase and phone number and landing on my blog.

The other post is when Alyson and I tried out 10 steak restaurants in Tampa ordering the same thing at every single one. This is pretty popular via Google because I guess tons of people research "best steak tampa 2025" so I wrote "Visiting the Top Ten Steakhouses in Tampa (2025)" to recap our expensive experiences. Including the price and photo of each establishment has helped it place on Google.

I don't think I'll really use analytics or insights to guide my future blog posts, but its fun to see what is popular every once in awhile.