First and foremost, I want to say thank you. It's readers like you who make this blog worthwhile, whether you're reading, posting comments, sending me tips by e-mail, or saying hi in the Clements parking lot. Your support keeps me believing that there's a role for localblogging in Portsmouth. Thank you. Hope you are all having a great holiday season, and best wishes for an even better 2009.

And now, the news. Based on readership numbers, here are the Top 10 stories of 2008. Not surprisingly, they skewed to the political.

[Insert view: top_stories_2008]

If you want to drill down, you can see all of the year's blog posts here, sorted by readership.

And a few words about metrics. This year, hard deadlines received 35,341 visits (reading sessions) up from 28,127 in 2007. There were 57,323 page views, or individual pages served, up from 55,558 last year. The most important number, in my opinion, is the average number of unique visitors per month (as measured by Google Analytics), which jumped from 916 to 1,215 year-on-year, a 30% increase.

In 2008, I posted 120,433 words, which any writer can tell you is pretty good output. That's about a novel's worth of copy. There were 344 blog posts (up slightly from 323 in 2007) for an average of about 350 words — roughly, one page of text — per post.