Greatest Hits

Blogger.com appears to have introduced some new features. I can now keep track of how many page views my blog gets in total (1,234 in the last month, which is more than I expected), see which other sites have driven traffic to mine (mostly Google), and even see where in the world my readers are located. (Most of my hits in the past month have come from the United States, but the second-largest share came from Russia—how weird is that? I mean, they don't even use the same alphabet.)

One of the most intriguing features for me was the ability to see how many views each individual entry has received. I just spent a half hour or so browsing through the list to see which entries have been the most popular, and I decided that you all might be interested to see them too (and possibly take a look at them if you missed them the first time around). So here they are, my Top Ten Hits:

#1, with 108 hits: Killer Tofu, which discusses what appear to be some crazy conspiracy theories related to soy products and then goes on to talk about how tofu measures up to other protein sources from an ecofrugal point of view.
#2, with 101 hits: Frugality versus simplicity, which explores the pros and cons of "the simple life" and contrasts it with the ecofrugal life.
#3, with 75 hits: Lowe's en espanol, a complaint about the fact that the English-language version of Lowe's sale flier features higher-priced products than the Spanish-language version. 
#4, with 73 hits: The Paradox of Efficiency, in which I dispute John Tierney's argument that higher energy-efficiency standards actually result in greater total energy use.
#5, with 67 hits: Make it do or do without, a couple of examples from my own life of cases in which an old, patched-up item is actually better than anything that could be purchased new.
#6, with 65 hits: The Resource Equation, which lays out the principle that an ecofrugal decision must balance money against other available resources, including time, materials, and effort.
#7, with 63 hits: Repair or replace?, my first attempt to come up with a useful all-purpose formula for figuring out when it's better to fix up an old item and when it's better to buy a new one. (I explored this question further in Repair or replace, part 2; Repair or replace, part 3; and Repair or replace revisited.)
#8, with 61 hits: Furniture mods, which shows off a couple of projects in which we altered old pieces of furniture to make them fit our space.
#10, with 53 hits (tie): Save Highland Park...from what?, a recent post in which I gripe about local NIMBYs trying to stop "high-density development" on the basis of what I consider to be entirely specious arguments.
#10, with 53 hits (tie): Tinkering, another post about various little projects that Brian and I (well, okay, Brian) did around the house with what we had available.

I'm not sure just what it is about these ten posts in particular that made them more popular than others, but if anyone figures it out, let me know, and I'll try to write more along the same lines.