What's Hot on CFAA?

Of the first 2000 posts on this blog -- a milestone mentioned in Another 1000 CFAA Posts -- which have been the most popular? Blogger.com (the domain used to manage blogs on blogspot.com) started reporting statistics in May 2010, meaning that I have just over five years of numbers covering all sorts of trivia.

Since most of the ongoing traffic comes from web searches, it's not too surprising that the most popular posts have less to do with chess than with some mainstream topic. The no.1 post on my blog, with more than double the views of no.2, is Access to Referrers, where I analyzed my website's log using MS Access. No.2, with 50% more views than no.3, is Crash Course in Soviet Geography, which features a map of the USSR. No.3, the first real chess post on the list, is Magnus vs. the Hustlers, my first Video Friday post for this year. In a footnote to the post, I commented,

Although it's been less than a day since I posted the link to the video, the post has received more than ten times the views I normally get on the first day of a new post.

A few days later, the clip was removed from Youtube and replaced with the message 'This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by VGTV'. Since VGTV is hardly a household name, a more productive approach might have been to add a comment to the clip's Youtube page with pertinent details.

Rounding out the top-10 (that's all blogger.com returns in its summary of stats) popular posts, the following all have similar numbers of views.

• Big Bang Chess • A hit TV show
• Chess in Africa - FIDE Members • Another map
• PGN Downloads • A popular search term
• Carlsen - Anand, More Mainstream Press • More Magnus; Anand also has his many fans
• 'Not a Sane Bone in His Body' • A revealing Fischer story
• My 1000th CFAA Post • CFAA must mean more than 'Chess for All Ages'
• Top eBay Chess Items by Price • A reference point for a long-running series

A few months ago I explored the popularity of 'Top eBay Chess Items' in a pair of Chess Collectors' Corner posts : What's Hot? and What's Not?. What will the next 1000 posts bring? Check back here in four or five years.