Most read, least read

Happy New Year. May we all enjoy the year of good eyesight.

I missed a couple of meetings in late December because I was out of town. The Commissioners met on the 27th in their annual end-of-the-year meeting. You can read about it in the Rensselaer Republican. I have come to greatly respect the reporting of the author, Cheri Shelhart. I do not think those who do not attend the meetings realize how good a job she does. The minutes of the Rensselaer City Council meeting on December 23 are on-line here.

The Parks for People Campaign raised enough to get their second Patronicity grant of $50,000. Work on the concession stand in Brookside Park continues and the exterior of the building has been completed. On Thursday City workers were hooking up utilities.

It appears that the old bottling plant/laundry on the corner of Clark and Cullen is being dismantled.

There is a dumpster in front of the bakery and it is full.

Finally, beavers continue to be active along the river. The picture below was taken from the bridge over the Iroquois in the Cemetery and Bicentennial Park.

I saw several blogs that listed their  most-read posts for 2019 and decided to see what the list would look like for this blog. This blog runs on Google's blogger platform, which keep statistics post views, though I do not know how they are calculated.

The most read post of the year (and of all time) was one of the posts on the fire:
"The morning after the big fire". It was followed by a post that mentioned that Arby's in town was closing, "Goodbyes". A second post on the fire came in third, "Major fire destroys half a block of downtown". The reason that these posts attracted as many viewers as they did is that my links to them on Facebook were widely shared.

Trailing far behind in fourth and fifth places were two posts on the murals: "Rensselaer murals, finished?" (they weren't) and "Rensselaer murals mostly finished". In sixth place, "A lot of pictures," had pictures of the ruins from the fire and a tour of the construction taking place in the former PNC Bank building.

"August already" was a mix of odds and end and "More Wind", in eighth place, reported on one of the meetings discussing the wind turbine ordinance. The final two posts in the top ten were "Paint, spikes, and water" and "New Restaurant and City Council Notes".

The least read post of the year was "1908", which had several clippings from the local newspaper from 1908.