The National opened for business in April of 2008, and the newspaper had a website from the start. Of course.

But in the past year or so, efforts to get readers to the site have intensified, and more people are involved on the web side of things, and page views have gone up dramatically.

So, I decided it might be interesting, to those of you not checking thenational.ae every few minutes, to see what people are reading on our site.

The list:

1. World’s most expensive cupcake to go on sale in Dubai. This was the subject of a blog item here two days ago. Talk about a story with legs. Maybe people just love to read about cupcakes … or really expensive stuff.

2. Transfer talk: Stoke get Ness, Newcastle must wait for Douglas. This surprises me. That it’s No. 2. The transfer season is just getting cranked up. These are not elite teams, and those are not elite players. Some days, we can be veddy English.

3. Daily-deal sites face new rules on offers in Dubai. Groupon, and stuff.

4. Toddler, 2, dies after suffocating in sweltering car. We had these back in SoCal, too. Awful. I’m amazed this doesn’t happen more often here, as hot as it is. Some have suggested the comparitive lack of car seats here is good for kids, when it comes to the “left behind in a car on a hot day” thing, because a child not in a seat is less likely to be forgotten/left behind.

5. Abu Dhabi Vision 2030 takes place among world’s elite projects. Sounds a bit dull, doesn’t it? 2030 isn’t exactly next week or next year. Not a pressing story. But someone is reading. Basically, Abu Dhabi is thinking big.

6. Mosque door that was to be “closed until end of world” broken down by rebels.  This is a story I would read. Who said the mosque door would never be opened? Who was going to open it, when the world ended? (Are the Mayans involved, somehow?) And which rebels opened it? (Turns out, it’s awful extremists of the Taliban sort.)

7. Emirati girl, 14, ran away to meet Facebook friend. Always a bad idea.

8. Huge tailback on Dubai motorway as minibus flips over. OK, some translation. A “tailback” is Britspeak for a traffic backup, and a “motorway” is a major highway. Anyway, people always want to know about the cause of jams, right?

9. Couple avoids sex charge by proving marriage. Premarital sex is not just a topic of morality here, it is against the law. Sex out of marriage … you can go to jail. Though I don’t recall many people doing time here on that charge.

10. Sharjah bans satellite dishes. Wait! What? I’m going to read that right now. Ban dishes? How can they do that? Sure, it leads to some ugly roofs, but how are you going to get your satellite TV without satellites? And Sharjah is the third-most populous of the seven emirates.

Check back soon to see what sort of wacky stuff is going on locally.