I started blogging in… 2004, I think, when a grad school friend of mine suggested that a bunch of us start sites at Xanga.  That blog lasted five years of mostly-daily publishing through the first three or four years and then a slow decline over the last year.  A year and a half or so ago I got dragged back into a new Xanga site at the suggestion of a friend I’d met through the first blog, and then Xanga exploded and I moved operations over here.

In six or so years of blogging at Xanga, I got around a hundred and twenty thousand hits.  Here’s the traffic from my first year at WordPress:

…so I’m at half the traffic of six years of blogging at another site, in a year.  Traffic’s dropped way off from wintertime but that’s because I’ve invested less time into babysitting the site; it’s starting to climb back up again lately and I’m fine with that.  All said, nearly sixty-five thousand hits in a year is not something that I feel like complaining about.  It’s awesome.

What?  You want more nerd stuff?  Okay:

 

I am down to mostly third-world countries, Islamist theocracies, and Communist strongholds as far as countries that I haven’t seen traffic from yet.  And Kosovo.  Seriously, Kosovo, what the hell is your deal, what did I do to you?  I’ve had so much traffic from the rest of Europe that I’m starting to wonder if WordPress thinks Kosovo is a country just for this map but actually interprets traffic from there as being from someplace else.  And somebody hitting me up from Svalbard island would be nice, but I think there are only seeds and ice there and I don’t think seeds and ice use the Internet.

One more, while I’m sharing numbers:

That followers number staggers me, even as I’m convinced that it doesn’t mean much– I had one random couple of days a few months ago where I inexplicably got almost a thousand page views in a day, but there are nowhere near three thousand people coming here even on a monthly basis, so I suspect the majority of those followers are bots or fly-bys.  Still, though, when I look at most of the other blogs I read, three thousand seems like a lot for people who aren’t otherwise celebrities or well-known, and I’m certainly not that.

So, yeah.  I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in this place over the last year but I think it’s been worth it and it’s been a lot of fun.  We’ll see how the next year goes.  Hopefully Kosovo will show up so I can start shooting for Liechtenstein and Vatican City.  🙂

Thanks for reading!

(Actually, let’s not make that a three-word thing:  Seriously.  Thanks for reading.  Y’all are awesome.  I mean it.)