My Blog's 5,000th Anniversary

I started blogging in 2007 and it was mainly a personal pursuit.  I like writing but I needed something to motivate me.  I definitely operate on "inspiration of deadline" that Larry Heinemann (novelist and one of my writing teachers) refers to. Without a deadline, I don't write. I am not like Toni Morrison who claims she writes at every waking opportunity, like on the subway and in line at the bank.  I need a push.  So a blog title that implies that I will blog everyday gives me that push.  I tried blogging everyday, not only didn't I have time but most of the posts were not very good or quite mundane.  I do learn something new everyday but most of the time it is not something that worth blogging about. So if you read the earlier blog entries you will notice that they are quite different than the newer entries.  Also, I decided a couple of years to personalize it more, so the newer entries have more about me than the older ones.

My blog (this blog) just reached 5,000 hits.  This is amazing to me.  Thanks to the tools on Google's Blogger, I monitor the number of hits and where they come from.  Below are the stats for all time, since I started in 2007.  This is only the top ten.  I have seen also hits in Yemen and Nigeria and in a lot other far away places.

Entry	Pageviews
United States	3252
United Kingdom	251
Russia	198
Canada	183
Germany	102
Australia	95
Ukraine	64
Japan	57
France	31
Singapore	28

Most people hitting my blog are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Windows (over 70%). Only 11% are using Macs and 4% using IPhones, hopefully not while driving.

My most popular post (with over 400 hits) is the entry I made on Neil Degrasse Tyson and the Titanic.  I attribute this to the film being released to IMAX last year.  Dr. Tyson is popular but somehow I think the film is the reason for these hits.  

It is interesting the second most popular post (with 229 hits) is an entry I did the same month as the Titanic post, November of 2011, the posting about the He's Dead Jim message that appears in Microsoft Windows when you power down your PC.  I remember being very annoyed with the stress that this message caused a friend of mine.

The most common search terms used to get to my blog is "shore of Tripoli reference."  This will bring you to my blog entry about the reference to the shores of Tripoli in the Marine's Hymn. My guess is that this entry is popular because of the events going down in Libya this past year.

The entry which I have gotten the most grief over is the posting I did about population growth back in 2010. If you look at the entry, you won't see all the comments I received about this post, this is because I got them on Facebook.  I share my blog with my friends and I get separate comments there.  I don't know if those hits are even counted by blogger.  Every person that commented on that entry is someone that I know that has kids.  It ended up being a pretty good discussion with the exception of the one woman who accused me of wanting to kill her kids which I chalk this up to either my lack of clarity or possibly a literacy problem. Nothing about killing any one's children appeared in the entry.

Going forward, I hope to hit 10,000 hits in a shorter time period than five years. I do realize that hits don't necessarily mean that someone is reading it.  Someone may get to my blog and then not even read it.  But since there is no way to measure actual readers, I will assume that most of them are actually readers.