December 2024/January 2025

Happy New Year to you all. I said yesterday at the end of my review of Christmas lunch at Grand Szechuan that today I’d be posting the look back to the past year on the blog. I’ll actually have that tomorrow. Today I have only the smaller scale look back at what was popular on the blog in December and a brief look-ahead to the first month of 2025.

Traffic in December was a bit higher than in November for most of the month; and then in the last week there was a dramatic spike in page-views that made it not only the busiest month on the blog in 2024 but the busiest month ever by quite a margin. Frankly, I’m not sure if this page-view spike was/is legit; it’s possible that WordPress.com’s stats engine stopped filtering out bot traffic that it usually separates from traffic reports. I say this because while the unique visitors count was also higher in December 2024 than in any other month in the blog’s history, this increase was not particularly remarkable—just about a hundred more visitors than in September 2024, which had been the month with the previous high. So it’s hard to square the reasonable rise in unique visitors with the far sharper rise in page views. Whatever the truth of the traffic, what were people reading on the blog in December?

The top 10 most-read posts for the month were the following:

No change at the top from November with my reports from Bukhara in Delhi and Mangwon Market in Seoul holding on to the top 2 spots. Mercato Centrale and Noryangjin Fish Market slipped to the bottom of the top 10 while Kwality rocketed up to #3. The only local restaurant report to crack the top 10 featured El Sazon’s gas station tacos (my review of Vinai from late October was in the top 20; and despite being posted on Dec 31, the Grand Szechuan Christmas Lunch cracked the top 30). Was the Christmas Lima Beans recipe particularly popular because people were searching for Christmas recipes? On the whisky front, the current Lagavulin Offerman Edition and the Indri continue to be popular. Oh yes, my post about the Kolatkar poem got a lot of eyeballs again too.

What can you expect in January on the blog? More of the same with just a minor scheduling change. There will still be one booze review and one restaurant report posted every week (with a max of four per month for the booze reviews). While the booze reviews will continue to show up on Mondays, the regular restaurant report will now be posted on Wednesdays. Any extra reports—from trips or on other subjects—will show up on Fridays and/or Sundays. And as I said recently, it’s going to be all Twin Cities restaurant reports for the next few months. Well, once I get done with the two remaining reports from my recent India trip. Those India reports will go up this week. The first Twin Cities restaurant report of the month—which will be posted next Wednesday—will be on a Vietnamese restaurant in St. Paul. We have no other restaurant eating plans firmed up yet and, as always, I am open to suggestions.

Okay, more navel gazing tomorrow!