By my calculations, this is the 500th post at Indolaysia. This blog has been up since September 2004, when it was an old and clunky Typepad site.

TP and JM, New Years 2005

In that time, lots of changes. TP has become Assistant Professor TP, JM has become JMP, we’ve added EP and are about to add one more, and what started as a travel blog to keep our families abreast of developments during a year in Southeast Asia has morphed into a rather more serious professional blog with periodic silly comments about travel, food, and politics.

Normally you do these sorts of retrospectives on the 10th anniversary, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll remember to post then. 500 posts seems like a nice important yet similarly arbitrary figure, and I happen to have noticed it. To celebrate, here is a top 11 list of our favorite posts of all time, in chronological order.

• Diarrhea star
• Liveblogging the Boxing Day tsunami
• This just in: Powersauce is awesome, and so is UMNO!
• Nusantara cultural comparisons
• Taxi economics in KL
• Soeharto: A Political Obituary (this post is my personal favorite)
• Austrian economics meets the Wolani of West Papua
• JMP moves a grand piano from BSD City to Menteng via pickup truck
• Hating on Bakmi GM
• Making sense of the debt-ceiling debacle
• OMFG exogenous variation!

In the coming week I’ll roll out a couple of changes to the design. Indolaysia is today hosted by Cornell’s blog system, which is nice but which has very limited design options. I’m going to try to create something more visually appealing, working with what I have. Here’s to hoping I don’t muck it up, and that I remember to post again at our 1000 post into the milestone.

And thanks, readers, for reading.