Happy Thir­teenth Birth­day Small Things Con­sid­ered!

by Elio and Roberto

This com­ing Sun­day, De­cem­ber 1st, we'll be cel­e­brat­ing the thir­teenth birth­day of STC. Now a teenager! The blog has ma­tured to over 1300 posts, two per week with vir­tu­ally no in­ter­rup­tions. This is some­thing that makes us very happy. When we think about it, if we were to print all those posts on stan­dard let­ter size pa­per, the re­sult would be a tome per­haps six inches think. Just a thought though, we'll skip the print­ing and save the pa­per. The blog has en­joyed more that three mil­lion vis­its over its his­tory. Con­sid­er­ing there had been around one mil­lion pageviews at the ten year mark, the rate of vis­i­tors hav­ing a look at STC has cer­tainly in­creased as of re­cent. Cur­rently, we get some­where be­tween 1000 and 1500 pageviews a day, from all over the world. We do note, how­ever, a very healthy re­duc­tion to about half that num­ber of vis­its on week­ends; we are pleased to note that mi­cro­bial en­thu­si­asts have a good per­spec­tive on leisure time. All of which is to say that we have many good rea­sons to cel­e­brate this thir­teenth birth­day of STC. This be­ing the time of year when the Thanks­giv­ing hol­i­day is ob­served in the United States, it's a good mo­ment to ex­press our grat­i­tude.

Thir­teen years of Small Things Con­sid­ered (Source: STC)

There's lots to be thank­ful for. The suc­cess of this blog is in great part due to the ef­forts of past and present As­so­ciate Blog­gers (present mem­bers listed on the right, un­less you are read­ing this on a smart­phone, scroll to the bot­tom). We want to send a very spe­cial thank you to Jamie Henzy, who for the past sev­eral years con­tributed nu­mer­ous stel­lar posts. Jamie re­cently stepped down from STC and she will be sorely missed! We wish her the very best in her new job at North­east­ern Uni­ver­sity. It is not just the "in­sid­ers" that con­tribute posts, a good frac­tion of our ar­ti­cles come from "out­siders," stu­dents, post-docs, fac­ulty, who with their writ­ing greatly en­rich the con­tent of the blog. To all of them we send our heart­felt thanks. We note that their contribu­tions are about equally split be­tween in­vited posts and un­so­licited pieces.

So, if any of you read­ing this feel the de­sire to send us a piece… please, by all means do con­tact us. Even if you just have an idea of a topic you'd like us to cover, write a com­ment be­low or email us. We love to hear from you our au­di­ence. Be­cause, you our read­ers are the main rea­son we keep the blog go­ing and we thank you for your grow­ing sup­port. Muchas gra­cias a to­dos!