Top 5 NLG Steampunk Articles 2011

Choosing my blog's Top 5 articles for 2011 wasn't easy. If I ranked them by pageview, recent articles would be at a disadvantage against those that have been published for some time.

In the end I decided to rank them by calculating the average monthly pageviews [(actual pageviews / days published) * 30 days]. As a last step I removed seasonal posts as with my formula they skewed the result. Seasonal posts are articles that might be very popular at the end of the year, but will probably be ignored during the rest of the year. The results in reverse order:

Top 10 Steampunk Web Articles 2011

Everybody seems to make best of the year lists, so I'm making my own. The rules are they must be related to Steampunk, and not have been linked to elsewhere on my blog. It doesn't matter when they were published, but I must have discovered them during the past 12 months. In reverse order:

Amerigo Vespucci: The World’s Most Beautiful Ship

I had the luck of visiting the Amerigo Vespucci, a tall ship of the Italian Marina Militare, named after the explorer of the same name. When I saw pictures of this ship I thought it was made of wood, so imagine my surprise when I saw it's made of riveted steel plates. It seems caught between two eras, the looks of an 18th century wooden ship, and the technology and materials of the 1920's (with small upgrades for the 21st century). Click on the pictures to see in more detail.