Flour Power

That's right! This little corner of the web is already one year old. And so I feel obliged to do some kind of summary.

It's was on the 17th of January 2009 that I inaugurated Flour Power. One year later and it's still here, after 239 posts with 292 comments. The site has seen a total of 83,512 unique visitors that produced 105,092 pageviews. Most of them got here from search engines (76.87%), of which Google was the biggest contributor. Geographically speaking, the 4 biggest sources of traffic were the USA, the UK, Canada and Ireland. But there was also 1 person from Rwanda that considered the blog interesting enough to spend more than 5 minutes here.

And what made all those people come here? The 10 most popular posts of 2009 (excluding the Facebook "incident", which alone caused about 50% of the total traffic) were:

1. Barney Stinson’s “Get Psyched” Mixes (3,969)
2. Katy Perry Totally Looks Like Zooey Deschanel (2,454)
3. Fixing Windows Live Messenger 8100030F Error (2,343)
4. Make Your Own Pop Art With Warholizer (1,851)
5. Ryanair Flight Attendant Edita Schindlerova is Pornstar Edita Bente (1,708)
6. Turn Your Picture Into a “Obama Hope Poster” (1,490)
7. Listen to Dave Matthews Band New Album For Free (1,475)
8. Google Chrome is The Safest Browser Around (1,302)
9. Test Your Movie Skills With Empire magazine’s The Cryptic Canvas – 50 Movies Hidden in a Painting (1,300)
10. The Cryptic Canvas Answers (1,011)

As far as content is concerned, Flour Power started off as a daily frequently updated diary of my "adventure" of leaving my home country for 6 months to live in Galway, Ireland. As those 6 monhts turned into a year (and now probably two), the frequency of said reports was reduced, and the type of posts changed with it. This is now a place where I post the most fun/interesting/useful stuff I find around the web, along with the occasional rant about whatever is bothering me at the moment. And that's how I plan to keep it going forward.

So if you enjoyed it so far, stick around for a while longer. I'll try not to disappoint

Hello everyone! (yes, both of you!). I present you the first post of what I hope to be my long lasting personal blog.

First, some background.

I've been planning to start a blog for some time now. I guess I felt the need to have some kind of presence on the web besides having an account in all the major social networks. Or maybe I just wanted to share my ramblings with more than just the person that happens to be next to me at the time. The truth is, the blog never got started until now. And why was that? Those that know me might say it was laziness (which, I must admit, is one of my many "skills"). I prefer to think it had to do with the fact that my life wasn't that much interesting and that I shouldn't waste my time writing uninteresting stuff for no one to read.

But something happened to make me take the step to actually do it...

And that was being selected to be part of the Inov Contacto program! What that meant was being sent for an internship in a company I didn't choose, in a city that could be anywhere in the world. My destination: Galway, Ireland!

This was the tipping point for the blog creation and so, from now on, this is going to be my small space on the web. For starters, I'll be posting all kinds of adventures I happen to stumble upon during my stay in the country where Guinness was born. Since this is a personal blog, you may also expect to find posts about my interests, which include movies, music, tv shows, poker, technology, books and, of course, funny stuff on the Internet. And then there might be some seemingly senseless posts...

You might be wondering why am I writing in English since I'm actually Portuguese. Well, this is yet another attempt to keep improving my English. And I have quite a few non-Portuguese-speaking friends that might be interested in reading what I have to say. And I'll write in Portuguese whenever I need to say something that can't quite be expressed without the richness of our beautiful language

And that's basically it. Join me for the ride!