Sandwiched right between Valentine's Day and my wife's birthday Force of Good turns four today.

Here are some stats for the past four years.

                                           One          Two            Three            Four
Visitors                                2,525     12,792        43,166         46,445
Posts                                      135          204             178             152
Comments                                52          253             685             655
Conversational Index                .38         1.24            3.85            4.31
Ranking*                           788,400   189,138      180,054        46,798
*technorati      

Unlike past years the numbers presented above are not cumulative.  Doing so makes it easier to understand what is transpiring.  I also added a row showing the number of posts and used this info to calculate a Don Dodge version of a conversational index.

The number of posts written on FoG has fallen.  Part of this, I am sure, is that I manage multiple blogs these days.  Another big part was I took a spring break from writing last year to gain a little perspective.  When I cranked things back up in the summer I had made the conscious decision that I was not going to write to build traffic, I was going to write to build community as well as devote more of my free time to other endeavors.

Traffic continues to grow, albeit at a decreasing rate.  More important to me is the fact that the conversational index is a healthy and a good indicator of the community here. 

The Technorati rank also has taken quite a jump, driven by the number of inbound links currently pointing to FoG.  I also ran FoG through Blog Grader and it emerged with a grade of 95.8 and a rank of 10,442 which put FoG in the 94% percentile.

Happy Birthday FoG.  You are growing up.