200 And Counting!!!

Well believe it or not, this is post #200!! If Blogger didn't keep track of such things - I wouldn't have known - but they do keep track - there is a running total of published and unpublished posts on my Blogger dashboard.

It is hard to believe that I have made this many posts, but I have. It will be exactly one year on February 14, since I made that first post. I didn't set out to write 200 posts in my first year. I had decided to do 50 posts in the first 50 days because I had turned 50 a few months earlier. I then switched to every other day and now post about every third day. It isn't that I have run out of ideas! I keep a list of ideas and notes on various subjects that I eventually want to write about. I don't often have to go to that well of ideas, as I often find inspiration in day to day conversations, news and life in general.

I also keep lots of humouous emails and links to various web sites that make me laugh or inspire my creative juices. My recipe files are still overflowing with recipes that I eventually want to try and many that I already know I love and want to share with you.

As many of you have no doubt notices, there is a couple of hit counters at the bottom of the site. The freeware counters help me keep track of the traffic on the site. I started off with Bravenet as it was really basic. New or returning visitor, pages viewed and a few other minor details. Nothing that special. There was a technical problem on their site back in the summer and I was without a counter for a day or two, so I went looking for another counter as a backup.

I chose SiteMeter as it was also free and the details it provided intrigued me. With most hits, I can tell what country the hit is from. It usually tells me the province/state and sometimes the city. Please note that I CAN'T tell who you are unless you tell me who you are by posting a comment, sending me a message or telling me in person that you were on at a certain time. It provides only the basic of details but it is really interesting to see where the hits are coming from. Since July, I have had hits from every Canadian province and territory except Nunavut! I have had hits from at least half of the states in the USA. I have had numerous hits from Australia, New Zealand, England and Ireland. There have been hits from Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Philippines, South Africa, Nigeria, Jamaica, Trinidad, Brazil and a few other places. It is amazing to me how small this world really is.

One of the other things I like about using the hit counter from Site Meter, is that it tells me how you came to find my blog. If you clicked on a link at the bottom of an email that reads http://dnsyl57.blogspot.com/ then I know that someone I sent an email to hasn't cleaned out the info on my email. That's okay though as you were curious enough to come have a look. Several people come in through a bookmark for my blog or through the RSS feed!
My blog is also linked to Google search, so if you hit my blog through that search engine I see what you were searching for. It is amazing what people actually search for!! I haven't kept detailed records of what pages have been hit through these searches but I do know which three posts have gotten the most hits.

The third most popular hit was "Groundhog Day". It got several hits in the first couple of days by people wanting to know whether the groundhog in there area saw it's shadow.

The second most popular hit was for my post about the Blizzard of 1986. There have been at least 25 hits since that went up in November! The hits have come from all over the world!

The most popular post I did was December 23. It was called "A Little Christmas Humour" and was a collection of Christmas themed cartoons. The hit counter went a little crazy that day and the next couple of days as well. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. You see I also post as "dns" on the Give Away Of The Day web site. The site provides an option to link your name to your website, which I had done a few months earlier. I had posted in the forums recently so assumed it was people just looking around to see who had their own sites and what they were about. Well, after getting about 15 hits in a couple of hours, I clicked on the link that people were finding me from.

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather! There was a thread called "Some Xmas Chuckles". A member had been looking at various member websites, liked the cartoons I'd posted and started a thread to let everyone know about my little corner of the web! I had over 70 hits in 4 days! That was more than I'd had in over two months!!

In the past year I've had almost 900 page views by almost 550 people. That may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but when I started this blog, I only told about thirty people about it. I have no idea who the majority of you are, but I want to say thank you to all of you for stopping by. I hope you found what you were looking for and enjoyed what you saw!

To those of you who have come back a few times or better yet come on a regular basis, I can't begin to tell you how much it means to me that you take time out of your busy schedules to see what my warped little brain has decided to post! Thank you!!

As I said earlier, I still have lots of ideas, recipes and humour to post in the future. I will say that there won't be 200 posts in the coming year - I'm aiming for between 75-100! I hope you will continue to visit this page and if you like what you see, please leave a comment here or on the guestbook. Feel free to invite your friends!

Thank You!!!

dn