A year of blogging

On January 1st, 2008, at 8.11 p.m., I made my first post on my new blog. As of the same time tonight, January 1st, 2009, I've posted 1,159 articles and entries, and 288,711 visits have been made to this site to read them. This blog's Technorati 'authority' (TA) is presently 84, and it's ranked 59,902 out of the "fifteen to thirty million active blogs" that organization claims to track.

That's an amazing and very humbling thought to me. I hoped I'd be able to attract and keep your interest, but I truly hadn't expected your numbers to grow this quickly or to reach that sort of total in a year. At the time of writing, visits are averaging over a thousand per day on a weekly tracking basis, sometimes spiking to several thousand a day if a particular article is linked by another major blog (see below) or Web service such as Reddit. (That's why October's figure is so high - a single article made it onto Reddit, and brought in over 10,000 hits! Click the graph for a larger view.)




Of course, I'm still a long way behind my blogging friends who encouraged me to start this blog. They've had longer to build up their readership. A few examples, in alphabetical order, from those also registered with Technorati:

1. Ambulance Driver - TA 173, rank 22,586
2. Oleg Volk - TA 143, rank 61,144
3. The Munchkin Wrangler - TA 95, rank 51,177
4. View From The Porch - TA 198, rank 18,756
5. Xavier Thoughts - TA 122, rank 73,786

Thanks, friends, for the encouragement, and setting a target for me to aim at! In particular, thanks to Lawdog, who nagged me until I gave in and started BRM. He's not listed in the Technorati statistics above, because his blog isn't registered there, and they therefore don't rank it: but he and Tamara are probably the alpha dogs in our blogging pack in terms of readership.

I'd like to thank all of you for joining me on this blog. It's been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun, and I promise to keep working to maintain and improve its standard. At this rate, I hope to hit two thousand daily visitors by the end of 2009!

If you find anything annoying or lacking about this blog, please let me know - my e-mail address is in my profile. If you like it, please tell your friends, and ask them to stop by.

Peter