Post 1,500

When I first posted on this blog back on November 12, 2006 I said:

I wrote my first blog back in 2000 while working at the Warsaw Business Journal.
(snip) Back then I promised readers a daily update of ex-pat life in Poland. That promise was well-intentioned but more often than not it was a broken one. Blogging on a regular basis can be time consuming and lets admit it most of us don't have that much excitement in our lives that warrant a daily post. Basically I've started this blog to keep a record of our trip to Vietnam in December. We'll see how that works out.

1500 posts and more than five years have passed since I wrote that "mission statement" if you like - funny how we slip back into "bureaucrat-speak" isn't it?  And what I wrote still holds true today - blogging is time consuming and hard work, and often topics or events that thrill you would bore your readers to distraction or at least to click quickly away to something more fascinating.  My blog log (look Ma I rhymed) shows that there are 61 posts sitting in "draft" status - things started, abandoned and on occasion restarted and once again abandoned.  Perhaps this is a good time to clean up that file - finish off the gold that cries to be posted and delete the rest as the dross it is  A project for a snowy, cold day - which could be any day this month or next!

Looking at one set of tracking statistics I see that since that day in November there have been:

• 111, 879 visits (that does not include the times when the code suddenly disappeared from the template)
• 64,365 unique visitors (I have always thought that all of my visitors are unique)
• 153, 060 page views (thought this conflicts with the stat on another counter that says 103,160 since June 2009)
• 168 countries are represented on that survey and though the bulk of my visitors come from the U.S., Canada, Italy and the United Kingdom at least on one occasion someone in Vanuatu (Cameron or Dan during their stint there?), Saint Helena and Bhutan (Bev on one of her many exotic trips?) have clicked their way here.
• The most visited post has been A Word of Warning which suggests there is a great deal of interest out there in the corseting of Austro-Hungarian royalty and obscure 19th century German texts on healthy living!!!!
• The most popular search strings have been "crollalanza", "pavol breslik gay" - apparently he is but you couldn't prove it by me - and "the past tense of fly" which since it addressed the flu I caught on a flight from Beijing to Toronto must have disappointed all the grammarians out there.

But what a statistics gathering programme can't measure is the pleasure I've experienced in recording the things that have interested, pleased, saddened and, on occasion angered, me.  Nor could it in any way record the friendships I have established with so many of my visitors and fellow bloggers.  The experiences of reading, corresponding, telephoning and in some cases meeting with people has enriched the past five years in so many ways.  And that, for me at least, has been the greatest reward of all the words, links and photos of the past 1499 posts.

And now to get to work on the next 1500!

26 January - 1500: Vicente Yáñez Pinzón is the first European to set foot on what is now Brazil.