The 200th Post! And A Bit of Navel-Gazing ;)

Happy weekend! Sooo this post has been in the works for a little while because it’s a bit special – it’s number 200 on this baby blog of mine! Now of course that is nothing compared to the thousands of posts that full-time bloggers crank out, but still I wanted to celebrate the round number in some way, and include some blog improvements on the way!

Check out the new category labels above in the header – I reorganized them and finally included all categories that I use so navigating the archive becomes a lot easier 🙂 Just click on the (sub-) topic you are interested in and you’re in business! Please note that the drop-down subtopics are ‘nested’ in the parent category, so if you click on ‘production’, for example, you’d find posts on agriculture, CSR, fisheries, the food supply chain, livestock production, and organic farming, as well as general posts to do with food production that I categorized under ‘production’ only. The more narrow your interest, the further you can go in the sub-topics, in some categories even three levels deep! Of course, there is also always the search box on your right – and you can also click on the tags of some of the posts to see whether I used the same ones on another post. So many options 🙂 Oh, and I nearly forgot – I also made a new ‘by region’ category where you can search for posts from a particular continent or country (e.g. the USA or Europe are the most frequent ones), and the ‘resources’ tab has subsections for helpful websites and infographics. Hopefully those sections will fill up more and more as time goes on!

Now to the fun part – looking at some stats! It’s hard to know in retrospect which are the most-read posts since they disappear in the ‘Archives’ category, but here are some of the most directly clicked-on posts:

• The post with most-ever direct views is EU Seed Diversity – The Final Word, mainly because another pretty big site linked to it since I was one of the first bloggers to talk about the agreement – interesting what a difference timing makes!
• On second place is 10 Things I didn’t know About Nitrogen Fertilizer – also an interesting choice. Maybe I should blog more about agricultural inputs? 
• Third, but not least, is my post about (and link to) Wendell Berry’s The Pleasures of Eating, which is totally deserved because Berry’s piece is so beautiful and a great explanation of where this whole movement and much of my personal motivation is coming from.  

(P.S. Want to know the poor stepchild of least-viewed posts? It’s [maybe not so surprisingly] one of my latest posts on US Ethanol policy, which I found so fascinating! Maybe go shower it with some love? No? 😉 )

I thought I’d also highlight some of my favorite posts looking back on the last couple of months:

• I really enjoyed thinking about How Much Choice Consumers Should Have, and am still not sure I made up my mind about it entirely.
• I also found looking into the History of EU Agricultural Policy history really interesting and a great learning experience, especially coming from a background where we never really talked about it.
• And finally, of course I always love talking about chocolate, and exploring the weirdly sticky prices that earned chocolate the nickname of the German Gold Standard was no exception.

Looking into where most people that read the blog come from, it looks pretty US-, UK, Canada and Germany-centric (no surprises there), though there are some fun outliers (hi, Fiji! Kiribati! Nepal!)

Also, funniest search terms that ended up bringing people to this site:

• “what does the university of wisconsins mbas learn about how to succeed in marketing” – probably because of this post, but I am unfortunately neither an MBA student nor at the University of Wisconsin (though a friend of mine is, funnily enough! Maybe I can ask him?)
• “all you could ever know about soil” – kind of a high goal to fulfill I am afraid…
• “all bad things about girls” – wait what? I am shocked!

Anyway, now I am curious – do you have any particular topics you’d love to know more about? Or a regional/thematic focus that I am not paying enough attention to? Anybody want to do a guest post on something you know a lot about that I am totally ignorant about? I’d really love your feedback!