I met Maxwell, founder and Editor in Chief of Apartment Therapy, 5 years ago at Alt Summit. My firt thought was man this newly single straight dude at this all-girl blogger conference is going to get mobbed. And then after hanging out with him for three days I still thought that, but I walked away so incredibly impressed with him as a leader and more importantly as someone very generous with his hard-earned information and experience. For those of us making careers in digital media its the wild west, the new frontier, a constant mission to mars without any clear direction or experienced pilot driving the spaceship. And his advice and generosity on blogging and digital media was life (and business) – changing. 

Maxwell has been in the game for over a decade which makes him the sort-of father of all bloggers. When I feel lost or I have no idea what to do about a certain blog-related problem, I call him and we have dinner or just text about it. This is all to say that he is one of the good guys and everyone who works for him says the same thing – he’s a generous leader full of innovative business ideas and creativity. Also he used to be a teacher before he founded AT and because of that he is just so nurturing as a boss and a friend.

Enough with my love affair for Maxwell, but I think that having a backstory of who created this massive site is interesting.

Apartment Therapy has a new book, Complete and Happy Home that just came out and its beautiful. We didn’t want to give too much of the inside of the book away so instead I asked them to pull together the Top 10 all time most viewed/popular posts. Now you’d think that the top 10 posts would be the 10 best posts, but its not necessarily the case (no offense to these posts or anything). Sometimes posts just HIT and you don’t know why but its so interesting to see what hits and to predict why something went viral. I’m always shocked what ends up being a massive traffic driver for us (I just looked up our #1 post and the photos and links are all broken otherwise I would show you, but its a TERRIBLE post).

Here are AT’s top 10 most popular posts over the last 10 years.

1. Ten Always Entertaining Party Games – I think i’ve googled this like 20 times so no wonder its so popular.

2. How Well Do You See Color – I remember doing this and doing VERY well at it.

3. Ceiling Space to Playing Space – Impressive.

4. 10 Things That Will Make You Happier at Home – Yep. Makes sense.

5. Clean Your House in 20 Minutes a Day – Fine. I’ll do it. These are smart.

6. 15 Uses for Tension Rods You’ve Never Thought Of – Before life hacks were all the rage.

7. The Most Relaxing Song Ever – Ha. I just pressed play on this while we were on set and everyone found it stressful.

8. How To Clean Scorched Pans – I guess A LOT of people have scorched pans and aren’t sure what to do about them.

9. Gardening Without A Garden – Yea, I get this. I kinda want to get into this.

10. Ultimate IKEA Shopping List We got some love from this one.

Interesting, right?

But fine, if you want a sneak peek inside the book, here you go:

It’s useful, pretty and full of information. It was shot by an amazing photographer, Melanie Acevedo, who I used to work with in LA. It’s easy enough to pick up and read 5 minutes at a time, and pretty enough to pick up and not even read a word.

Now go grab yourself a copy of Apartment Therapy’s new book HERE. Also, while you are at it you can by my book HERE.