CatSynth 5th Anniversary!

Today we mark the 5th Anniversary of CatSynth!

I started this site on July 19, 2006 as a novelty when a friend and former colleague at E-MU systems suggested that I “should make a website about cats and synths.”

Every anniversary we feature the photo of Luna from the inaugural post.

I still have that Novation keyboard, though it does not get used as often of late. Luna of course still is very territorial about that beanbag chair. Times have changed a bit, here is an iconic photo of Luna from this past year, this time with an iPad app (in this case, the Smule Magic Piano):

Another quirky way we like to celebrate is with statistics. First the basics:

1559 posts.
0.85 posts per day.
8784 comments.
5.63 comments per post.
476 posts featuring cats and synthesizers.
195 reviews (and gig reports).
381,735 visitors.

Even after five years, people from around the world continue to send us pictures of cats and music gear. These days most of those come via our Facebook, which together with twitter has become a major way people engage with this site.

From Google Analytics (which we finally got working properly over the past year), here is an overview of where our visitors come from around the world.

By far and away most of our visitors are from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia, France and Germany. I’m gratified to see so many visitors from India, though I’m curious why we never receive any comments from there…

It’s also interesting to look at cities.

Not surprisingly, the top cities are San Francisco and New York. In Google, it’s SF followed by NYC, while in Facebook, New York is the top city.

Our most popular posts judged by number of visitors are the annual endangered wild cats on earth day.  Over the past year, our most commented posts were:

Wordless Wednesday: Herman (Groundhog Day) 35
Wordless Wednesday: Doll and Metal Beams 28
Wordless Wednesday: 6506 (Baker Beach) 27
Wordless Wednesday: Matzoh Man 27
Happy Birthday Luna! 25
Wordless Wednesday: 7643 (New York, Late Autumn) 25
Wordless Wednesday:  Wet Paint 25
Wordless Wednesday: Mosaic with Saxophones 24
Wordless Wednesday: Summer Solstice 24
Wordless Wednesday:  Harrison Street Hipstomatic 23

Our top commenters the past year:

Kitty 199
Mickey, Georgia and Tillie 146
Gattina 94
CatSynth 90
The Chair Speaks 66
meowmeowmans 65
Snowcatcher 56
AVCr8teur 51
Daisy the Curly Cat 48
Cats of Wildcat Woods 41
Beth @ 990 Square 40

Thanks to all our friends (in time zones earlier than U.S. Pacific Daylight Time) who already sent in comments for the anniversary, and to the Cat Blogosphere for their anniversary shout-out!

And while we will continue to keep doing what we do, it has been more of a challenge over this past year to keep up with posts, especially the longer-form reviews. There is a trade between doing music and art, and writing about people doing music and art. But I still love doing everything here, and will find a way…

Fun with Stats: Nobel Peace Prizes by Country

In light of today’s Nobel Prize award in peace, a little number-crunching of peace prizes by country (using this Wikipedia page as a data source).  I actually did not guess this distribution in advance.

United States 22
France 10
United Kingdom 10
Germany 6
Ireland 5
Sweden 5
Belgium 4
South Africa 4
Switzerland 4
Austria 3
Israel 3
Argentina 2
Bangladesh 2
Canada 2
China 2
Egypt 2
Norway 2
Poland 2
Portugal 2
Russia / USSR 2
Costa Rica 1
Czech Republic / Austria-Hungary 1
Denmark 1
East Timor 1
Finland 1
Ghana 1
Guatemala 1
India 1
Iran 1
Italy 1
Japan 1
Kenya 1
South Korea 1
Macedonia 1
Burma (Myanmar) 1
Mexico 1
Netherlands 1
Palestine 1
Romania 1
Vietnam 1

You can read a speech by the most recent winner Liu Xiaobo here.

1000th Post

Today we at CatSynth publish our  1000th Post!

To mark this milestone, I created this mosaic featuring a few of Luna’s appearances:

Mosiac of Luna's appearances on CatSynth

[click to enlarge]

A few fun statistical facts about our first 1000 posts:

  • Luna has appeared in 238 posts almost 25%.
  • To date, there 270 cat-and-synthesizer posts.
  • As of this writing there are 5439 comments, or an average of 5 comments per post.
  • Over 150 Weekend  Cat Blogging posts.
  • 115 Wordless Wednesday posts.
  • Approximately 10% of posts feature our current hometown of San Francisco.

Here are the top 25 terms:

Cats 582
cat 414
Synthesizers 348
Luna 238
Music 200
weekend cat blogging 153
WCB 152
News 149
Art 145
Personal 133
Wordless Wednesday 115
San Francisco 97
Modernism 88
Photography 86
Reviews 77
Highways 70
synth 62
electronic music 59
cats on tuesday 56
analog 45
carnival of the cats 43
video 43
Music 40
Travel 38
midnight monday 36