It’s 32 minutes after 720 has ended and I have a fun post idea.

Check out this SWEET LIST OF MYTHICAL ANIMALS. If you could choose a creature to be on this list… which would you choose?

There’s a lot of creatures on the list.

I haven’t decided what I would want to be. Maybe a Gashadokuro… GIANT MALEVOLENT SKELETON? Sweet.

Dear Internet,

There it is. 744 posts. One an hour for the entire month of January 2008.

What a weird month. During a normal cycle of blogging, I find 20 minutes here or there to do posting for a day. This month… I would have five days in a row of no posting what-so-ever… and then sit down for 7 hours of post preparation in a single day. It was really annoying at times (the airport quiz? Good Heavens. that took freakin’ forever), but it was only a bit overwhelming for the last week or so. Most nights this last week required my staying up until 11:30 or 12:00 to get the next day ready to go. Not Cool.

Will I do this again? Never. Not a chance. First of all, the night posts were usually useless. If I were to ever do a mass posting event again, I would only schedule new content maybe from… 7am to 7pm. Those appear to be the hours that most people read. Heck, had we done that we could have gone on for TWO straight months.

A few people asked if I’d be so worn out by the marathon of posting if I’d ever get on the computer to put a post up again. Is this the end of MikeDiDonato.com? Nah. probably not. Even during all the mayhem I’d occasionally wish that I didn’t have automatic posts scheduled because I had some wild story to share. So there will be more in store on this website.

When can you expect the next update? Well. It won’t be in an hour. That’s for sure. I may take a day or two off to let the smoke settle. Either way I’ll probably be back in the normal schedule within a week.

Thanks again to all the readers and contributors. I hope you had loads o’ fun.

We’ll talk soon,
Mike D.

If I ever do a full month of posts again* I’m doing it in February.

*I won’t.

I sincerely apologize for inflicting this idiot scheme upon you all. — Mike D

I sincerely apologize for thinking up this idiotic scheme. — Ryan Schenk

Yes. In fact, the last week required four consecutive nights staying up until well past Midnight to get the posts ready for the next day. Ugh. Obnoxious. I hate 720.

This post was started 12 minutes before the hour it was suppose to get put up. It was actually scheduled… just two minutes before appearing. And even then, I read a mistake afterwards and had to change it four minutes after it appeared.

That readership went up. I was wholly expecting people to be overwhelmed by content. I really expected that by the end of January my readership would have dropped to new lows.

Were there any mistakes in 720?

Well yes. But nothing major. Occasionally I had a picturee that was posted incorrectly. And quite frequently I would forget to change the year of automatic posting. So instead of a post hiding in the depths of January 2008, waiting to appear magically at 4 in the morning…. it would randomly insert itself into 4am of January 2007. Oops.

The biggest error happened on January 10th. I mistakenly posted the picture of the Giraffe with a Cobra on its head a WHOLE DAY EARLY. Patrick even commented on it. Thankfully i fixed it within a few hours.

Were there any missed hours?

No.

Where there any double hours?

Actually yes. A few. I don’t remember which. so really, this was probably a 750 post month.

I just found a way better graph that shows page visits and unique visitors. Check it out HERE.

January 1. BIO
January 2. Haiku
January 3. Recipe
January 4. CoolWord
January 5. T-shirt
January 6. Poptart
January 7. FreeSwim
January 8. Culture
January 9. Interesting
January 10 Brevitous
January 11 Love&BB
January 12 Airports
January 13 Poptarts
January 14 FreeSwim
January 15 HairStyle
Januray 16 Facial Hair
January 17 Name that Rock Riff
January 18 Bandname
January 19 Kurt
January 20 Poptarts
January 21 FreeSwim
January 22 Mom
January 23 ComicBook
January 24 KitGadge and Ink
January 25 BandNames
January 26 MnstTruck
January 27 Poptarts
January 28 FreeSwim
January 29 Tats&sngs
January 30 Leftovers
January 31 720recap

The quest for the ultimate band name has nearly come to a close. It’s now down to two bands.

Vote for your Favorite:

Same Day Surgery

versus.

Feast of Comets

Let the best bandname win.

This is a fact that I was saving for this last day because it is extremely noteworthy. Back in October I had a big MSPaint contest. The challenge was to give me a costume.

The results was simple

Shaun McQuaid is the Freakin Man.

Shaun drew about 90% of those pictures. He e-mailed me early on in the contest and then sent me one a day for the rest of the month.

Why was this so amazing? Because I didn’t have enough. I wanted to post one in the quickthoughts section everyday… but I ran out by, about, day six. Shaun came through and he came through HUGE.

Thanks Shaun.

Remember the Name that Tune game? The single busiest day that this website has ever seen?

Irene DOMINATED. She had huge points.

Specifically:
FIRST Irene:
36.5 points

SECOND Chris:
27 points

THIRD Shamus:
20.5 points

FOURTH Mike G:
19 points

FIFTH Bruce Wayne and Sander:
11 points

SIXTH HC Alicia:
8 points

SEVENTH Paul:
5 points.

There were about 30 people who contributed to this marathon of posts. This is a representation of the biggest contributors

#1. Mike D.
370 posts

Not too much of a surprise here. what is amazing is that I ONLY wrote about 370 of the posts. When I started this thing I had assumed that I’d be writing WAY more than that. 370 is still a lot though. I’m tired.

#2. Ryan Schenk
113 posts

Ryan helped a lot. his day of mustaches was huge. As was the brevitous guides and just the shear mass of ridiculousness. Ryan also deserves credit for… well… the whole thing. it was his idea. He also thought up the poptarts idea and the Monster Truck idea. Well done Ryan!

#3. Kurt
40 Posts

Kurt’s full day really brought up his numbers. And it gave me a huge rest halfway through the month. Kurt also came through on nearly (if not every) challenge that I sent out to the group. Personal favorite? The shirt story. Thanks Kurt!!!

#4. Jesse
38 Posts

Just three posts behind Kurt, Jesse cashed in with finding all those break dancing videos and helping with monster trucks and his epic travel adventures. Well done dude.

#5. Chris
29 Posts

Amazing! Especially for joining so late in the game. Heck, when 720 started I didn’t even know that Chris read the website. In fact, I’m not sure if he did prior to 720. Thanks Chris!!

After the top five we had:

Shaun McQuaid: 17
Theresa: 14
Alicia: 12
Sander: 12
Ruth: 11

9′s
Tim, J2, Shamus

8′s
Irene

7′s
Roland, Mom, Nicole

6′s
jocelyn

And the rest are under five. But, that doesn’t mean those last handful weren’t helpful. In fact, between them, those last handfuls of people provided over a day worth of posts. And believe you me… saving me a day lifted a huge burden.

Thanks contributors!!!

720 posts is the power hour of internet blogging. The first ones go easy, the middle gets tough, but by the end, you don’t even know what’s going on…

This chart shows the unique visitor counts. A unique visitor is recorded by IP address. So if the same person comes to the website a bunch of times, it only counts once.

Prior to 720Posts, my personal record was somewhere around 350. This past month saw a high of: 432 unique visitors.

Four Hundred Thirty Two! That’s excellent.

You can also see from the graph there that there are a handful of three hundreds as well.

Holy Crap! January 17th was INTENSE.

that’s 2,293 page loads on Thursday the 17th. If we were to look at page loads as a meter of popularity, the 17th is the hottest.

Here’s the top five days of posts according to page loads:

2,293
Name that tune: January 17th

1,372
Band name showdown: January 18th

1,052
Disney Haikus: January 2nd

1,023
Free Swim #2: January 14th

919
Band Names & Monster Trucks: January 25th

Something to note about page loads… If someone were to sit at their computer and hit refresh 5 times… it would count as 5 page loads. Or, if you went to my website and then visited 4 different parts of the website… that would also be considered page loads. So it’s not an accurate representation of the number of people, simply the eagerness at which people are coming back and exploring the depths of the website.

When 720′s gone, I’m probably going to fall into my old pattern of checking eBay and Facebook between experiments instead of expanding my horizons on the subjects of facial hair, monster trucks, and Pop Tart flavors. February is going to be a sad month of change. I miss 720 already. With admiring affection toward http://www.mikedidonato.com – Chris

720 Posts was something that was pretty interesting. The themes went well at first, but then everyone forgot about it and the mad rush to the end only made it better. Same time next year?

“I didn’t think it could be done, but congrats Mike D for quenching my thirst for web content on an hourly basis. I can’t wait until next year…”

Specifically, how the heck did I organize it so I’d know when posts were posted? The answer is a giant google docs spreadsheet.

Check it out here.

On the far left there you’ll see the date in January and the topics. On the top and bottom there’s the time. Inside I wrote who supplied the content for that particular post. You’ll see tons of Mike D’s and a whole bunch of Schenks and a day of Kurts. we’ll go through some statistics of who contributed most etc. as the day continues.

For now, revel in the amazingness that is that sweet spreadsheet.

We have finished. This website has seen 720 posts… one an hour… for 30 full days of January. Now all that’s left are some statistics and interesting facts. As well as a little commentary describing people’s thoughts on participating.

Thanks everybody!!

Can anyone think of a sweet caption for this photo?