Introducing The "Weekly Top Five"

As long as I've had this blog I've had stats I've been able to see on a daily basis which tell me a lot of things readers are doing here. The specifics have changed over the years, and honestly, it is not a s useful as the old analytics once were.

One thing I still find fascinating is the stat I get which shows me which posts during a seven day period are getting the most "hits" here. Sometimes it is a surprise as to what people look at on "Guitar Ted Productions".

I have to assume after all these years of blogging that some of my posts show up in searches and then , perhaps, those might get posted on some forum, on Facebook, or some other social media, and then the link leads folks here and they read an article I wrote ten, or even fifteen years ago. 

Of course, I do a Top Ten Posts of whatever year I am reviewing at the end of each year now.  I thought perhaps my dear readers might like to see what others are finding interesting on the site on a weekely basis. So, I decided to start a "Weekly Top Five" showing links to five of the week's most read articles on the blog.

Sometimes those will be current posts, but as I mentioned, sometimes not. I will also post commentary with perspective on some of the older posts, and try to give some context as to why I wrote what I wrote then, which may not reflect what I'd say in 2025. With all of the above said, here is this week's

Musings On Tires: Tuesday January 29th, 2013: This was pre-gravel yet. Tires specifically for gravel had just been introduced and there were maybe two bikes which were "gravel specific" at the time of this post. The post is mostly about air pressure habits, and a lot of this holds water in 2025, but I feel like most people are on to this tactic by now. In 2013? Not so much.

Double Duty: Saturday April 5th, 2025: Talking about going to Sea Otter and doing Trans Iowa within a week of each other. Not fun....

Reaching "The End": Sunday April 29th, 2018: The announcement for the termination of Trans Iowa came at the stroke of 2:00pm on the date the post went up, which also marked the end of the last Trans Iowa event. Being this month marks the 20th anniversary of Trans Iowa's beginnings might explain the reemergence of this post, or maybe it is just April nostalgia. I've no idea, really.

Two Things: Sunday April 6th, 2025: Whenever I write a "Two Things" post it gets tons of hits. I've no idea why this concept seems to spark the interest it does, but it does. This time in Two Things I wrote about the trend in gravel for MTB sized tires and on bikes being called "gravel" which are really just adventure bikes following the mold of the Salsa Cycles Fargo.

The Curious Case Of The Vaya: Wednesday July 22nd, 2015: Here we have an opinion piece on the Salsa Cycles Vaya, an enigmatic model in Salsa's range at one time. The bike was originally supposed to be a light touring bike for bagged, self-contained touring. However; it just so happened that the Vaya's geometry and ergonomics were nearly perfect for gravel. The Vaya also could handle fairly big tires (big for the day was 43mm), so it was quickly adopted by many in the gravel scene as a race bike or everyday gravel rig. The titanium model was certainly almost exclusively used as a gravel bike.

Salsa Cycles missed the boat in regard to what people were actually using Vayas for, and so it never really was tweaked into the metal framed gravel bike which, from the time of the Vaya's introduction in 2010, was just the sort of gravel bike many people wanted. Just imagine a lighter weight steel tube set and a carbon fork with Three-Pack mounts on a 2011 Vaya. Man! I don't see how this bike would not have been THE gravel bike of the early twenty-teens.

And that's a wrap on this weeks Top Five most read posts! I hope you all enjoyed this and thanks for reading!