Category Archives: Discourse.net

Apparently, as law blogs go — if this is a true law blog any more than Is That Legal? which gets excluded — discourse.net is a popular blog (by all measures).

As I noted in a private comment to the original count at Opinio Juris, I think we should not take these measures too seriously. For one thing, they ignore readers via RSS feeds; I know many of you, like me, read most blogs via a newsreader. (FeedBurner claims there are about 750 850 of you, but that’s just an estimate.) I give a full text news feed because I prefer readers to hit counts. If counts matter — and why exactly do they matter? Isn’t writing style, or quality of ideas what we in the academy should be praising in our top 10 lists? — one might, for example, want to at least distinguish between blogs with a full text feed and those without.

However these words find you, thanks again for a few minutes in your busy day.

Some time in the last 24 hours, this page recorded its 500,000th unique daily visitor according to a strict metric, and this site also recorded its millionth page view according to sitemeter, which although something of an industry standard is a less strict count.

Thank you for your kind attention, and especially for your emails and comments.

Ominous email:

PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE MESSAGE VERY CAREFULLY!

If you have read everything and have any questions, please let us know.

Unfortunately it appears that your site is using more than your fair share of system resources on your shared hosting machine dawber. Our system has flagged your account because it is using a large number of CPU minutes per day on dawber. We need you to trim down your resource consumption considerably. Should you ignore this or subsequent warnings your account may be moved to an evaluation server which could cause downtime.

Specifically amf’s CPU minute usage for today is 56.70.

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Several people have suggested that I should somehow identify some past blog posts for new readers, a sort of ‘greatest hits’. Perhaps I should just point people to the ‘Torture’ category and leave it at that, but here (in alphabetical order) is a first cut at a representative list of posts I think I’d be happy to have a new reader look at, ranging from funny to grim.

• America Needs You, Harry Truman (2005)
• Apologia Pro Tormento: Analyzing the First 56 Pages of the Walker Working Group Report (aka the Torture Memo) (2004)
• A Constitutional Law Scavenger Hunt With A Serious Purpose (2005)
• Do Our Graduates Have Jobs? What Are They Making? (2010)
• Guantanamo: Our Collective Shame (2003)
• There is Hope for Us All (2004)
• Of Pigs and the Ballot Box (2003)
• OLC’s Aug. 1, 2002 Torture Memo (“the Bybee Memo”) (2004)
• Rose Burawoy, Political Scientist (2003) (my first real post)
• Ten Reasons Why You Should Teach Here — And Three Why You Shouldn’t (v. 4.0) (2010)
• The Walt Disney Company Standards of Business Conduct Illustrated (2006)
• What Belongs on the Faculty Desktop? (2004)
• When Bad Taste Is Acceptable (2004)
• Who Will Run Against Ros-Lehtinen? (All Politics Is Local) (2005)
• Why I Do Not Have a Treadmill (Sears Can’t Deliver) (2012)
• Why I Write ‘Legal Scholarship’ (2005)
• Yoo Unrepentant (2004)

Odd that so many cluster at the end of the alphabet.

In the event anyone cares, I welcome nominations for additions to the list.

Most recently amended on Feb. 5, 2013

For an approximation of what a packet from this blog does before launching out onto the Internet and finding its way to you, see the Dreamhost video. (Not suitable for those who get carsick on roller coasters.)

…at least according to Business Opportunities Weblog, which explains the calculation as follows,

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I’ve created this little applet which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.