Most visited blog post of all time! - what's yours?

I hope you are all enjoying spring so far, I am and I've had an idea.  I thought it would be fun to find out from my fellow bloggers what their most popular blog post has been since they began blogging - it would be an interesting way of trying to work out why some posts fly and seem to be really popular and some get read by just a handful of people and then never see the light of day.  I also want to create a really cool list if enough people post theirs - so think of it as a way of promoting your best post too :) 

I'll start the ball rolling but I'm really looking forward to finding some fascinating blog posts so please do add a comment with your own results (you don't need to share the figures, just the link) I know it wont be terribly scientific as some of us have 2 regular readers and others have 1000's but it will still be interesting to see what does well for people and should make for an interesting discussion and list of posts.

To find which is your most visited blog post, you can use google analytics. Use a content search and change the dates so it takes into account every post you have ever written and see what is top.  Or if you started blogging after June 2010 then you can use the stats on blogger, just click 'all time' and then see what comes up as top.

I'm going to share 2 of mine - They are both tutorials that do really well on google.

The first is my tutorial for adding a link bar to blogger - I posted it back in September 2009, it's still gets lots of hits and it's actually top for a search on google for 'adding a link bar'.  I used to promote this lots on places like the Folksy forum and I also made sure I responded to comments on there but now it just trickles visitors in.  It's the post that really got me interested in learning more and more about html and sharing little blog template hacks to make our blogs look cool.

The second is my purse tutorial - again this does really well in google and was published almost extactly a year later in September 2010 - it's actually doing better than the link bar tutorial so I don't think it will be long before it takes over :) 

They probably aren't my favourite posts just because they have done the best, although I am very proud of them.  Clearly they attract visitors and so they help get people over to see me and hopefully a few follows or a squiz at my (empty) shop. I think tutorials do that and they enable you to use keywords and offer something back which helps attract visitors and gives them a good reason for looking around or subscribing.

So those are my all time most popular posts but what are yours - please share the links as a comment and I'll collect them up and add them to a super list which I'll blog next week or whenever I have lots to share :)

Hilary :) - @haptree

Ladybirds are ace

Ladybird on Black Cherry Blossom courtesy of a beautiful sunny day in the garden today, the ladybirds are out in force and are one of my favourite things to photograph because of their dynamic design - aint nature brilliant!

You can see more on my Flickr set - 'Nature'

When did I become an art collector?

I am a very lucky girl, not only for having a lovely day out at the zoo but also I got a painting by Paul Bailey for my birthday last weekend (oh and a rather nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot, which went down a little too easily!)  Up close the painting looks like this -

Isn't it fabulous. Whilst knocking back quite alot of the good stuff we decided that we all desperately wanted to be inside the little cottage and looking out, a warm fire roaring away - we probably spent the rest of the evening in that cottage in fact.  Great paintings do that, they take you off to another place even if you are alone and they also create conversation when you are in company (friends or complete strangers in a gallery).  I haven't made a decision about the frame yet...  I always find this difficult, you want something that allows the painting to shine not recede, so it's a conundrum I will ponder whilst I also ponder where it might go...   mmmm  a nice quandry to have :)

I want to collect more, not champagne as is suggested by this picture above, but art.  It's so exciting to have a growing collection.  From the photos you can see a few pieces I have (mostly gratis), the colourful piece on the wall, is one of two I have by the artist Walter Nessler (see his obit - here) he was a friend of my great aunt and I was lucky to inherit them - I only met her twice, once at her brother's funeral and the second time when I was at university and we had a g&t in her garden and mostly talked about plants.  She was an interesting woman and wrote her memoirs in the last decade of her life (alongside an OU degree!), so I feel I know more about her than I would otherwise.  The painting 'boats' is so bright, it has lots of texture, and the light  from above casts these interesting shadows - looks to me as if it were painted in the 80's not the 50's.

The plate you can see is by my ex boss and friend Simon Moore a glass maestro who gave me this plate amongst other pieces as a leaving present when I worked for him back in 2005 - it has been with me for 4 house moves now and always travels seperatley in the car wrapped in a duvet, it's bright and fun and I love it - I put it up on a wall and along with my other pictures I feel I am home.

There's more but maybe I'll blog about them another time!

PS - Just time to fit in a quick random sun dance prayer -

Dear God of Crafts,

Could you please please please make the sun shine tomorrow so that on the off chance that I have just one hour of freedom I could possibly take one or two photographs of the lovely handmade purses that are hidden away and unsold in a plastic box in my wardrobe. (I'll accept overcast gladly, but no rain please)

x Hilary
(your servant as always)

mmm, not sure what's more likely, the one hour of freedom or it not raining!

Wanna see some awesome cupcakes?

Made by my other half for my daughters birthday.  He should really be a professional cake artist - what do you reckon!

 

 They are chocolate cupcakes with a butter icing, they tasted delicious but the impressive part was the melted white chocolate decorations.  These were made by piping out melted white chocolate onto baking parchment.

 

It's not messy because you pop the chocolate into a freezer bag, microwave it until melted (take it slow!) and then voila a perfect piping bag after a quick snip to one corner and no washing up. I asked him what this part was officially called but he said he wasn't sure if there was a term, so please let me know - it's kind of chocolate art really.

 

Sprinkles added because she is 7 and you need sprinkles!  We even made a cake stand for them but no pictures of that without copious amounts of other peoples children and I'm not sure I should blog them! 

 

We carried them very carefully!

As you can imagine my 7 year old and her friends were pretty impressed! her name and her co-birthday girls on a cake!  He made so many we were able to offer them out freely to all our grown up friends that helped with the party too.

I wrote a whole post about cup cakes last year called the cupcake class, you may be interested if you love cupcakes too and are interested in the socio-economic drive behind them (or maybe not, there's lots of nice pictures of cake too!) 

Kitchen Garden

Why break your back when a 3yr old is the perfect height and he can actually handle a screwdriver pretty well :)  We are in the process of transforming the kitchen.  We're making all the new doors ourselves so it's going to take ages, but should be beautifully bespoke and glorious and even in it's unplastered half done state it is an improvement on the hideous cat tiles we have had to put up with since we moved in. 

We're hoping to sell next year so just the kitchen and bathroom to go and hopefully the house will be snapped up.  (Check out Nifty Knits latest 'escape from the neighbours' blog competition if you want moving house tips or if you are a fan of doctor who)

Here's what I'm more excited about - yes a greenhouse!

We hadn't bothered with one as we thought we would have moved this year but as it's taken longer than we thought to get the house sorted then when we saw a bargainous deal in b&q we had to buy one - it's polycarbonate and 6 x 4, we've kind of plonked it on a raised bed and I've laid a loose brick floor so we can grow tomatoes in there just by removing a few bricks.  The bricks should keep it warm in the night too (thermal mass and all that!)

Oh and that's a beautiful single flower from our only hellebore in the garden - I want more of these, they're just stunning.

Has anyone started sewing seeds yet - lots of the packets I have say March  so I'm hoping to get out there tomorrow once I've finished a Mother's day card gift guide for the Folksy blog :)