Friday, June 06, 2008

Three Years of The Big Digital

3 candle

Hard to believe, but I've been blogging for 3 years now. 2 years ago I celebrated the one year anniversary of the blog, but last year, the day came and went without notice. If you want some stats, here you go:

Since I started blogging, I've published 302 posts (303 counting this one). I didn't have any kind of visitor tracking for the first 8 months or so, but in the 28 months since I started tracking there have been 41,613 visits to the site, and 61,186 page views. Early this year, I peaked with 4,722 visits to the site in the month of April.

Nearly all of the visits come from referrals from Google Images searches, especially for McDonalds characters, but also for album cover art for Garth Brook's The Hits, Counting Crows' August and Everything After, and Mana's Suenos Liquidos. There are also a few people who I'll call regulars, even though I don't know who they are. I just see their locations show up repeatedly in the visit log. I sometimes wonder if they are people I know or not, but mostly I just think of them as their location and usual time of the day, as in, "oh, there's Franklin Covey's daily visit."

As far as I can tell from Google Reader there are 9 people besides myself who subscribe to the feed of my blog in Google Reader. I just changed the blog template yesterday for the very first time in 3 years, and the only change was to make it fill up the width of the screen which I've wanted to do for some time, but wasn't sure how to do and keep the same color scheme.

As far as the blog goes after 3 years, I would have to say that I enjoy blogging. Having some structure helps me do it more regularly, so I tend to pick things that I want to write about and then do recurring weekly features about those things. I've cycled through a few lists and lately have settled in pretty good to blogging on Mondays about my weekend, and then on Wednesday finding a video to share, and then just whatever else comes to mind. Its nice for me to have somewhere to just type up my thoughts, and since people comment pretty rarely, it mostly just feels like I'm typing them for myself, which is fine. Its always kind of exciting when someone does comment though, so feel free to post a comment. I promise its really easy, and you don't have to set up an account or anything.

In the time I've been blogging, I've finished 3 years of graduate school, and really hope to be graduating in the next 3 months or so, and find a job, and I'll also be turning 30 in the next few months as well, so I may have to change the description of the blog soon. (Can I count 30 as part of the late 20s? I've been counting everything else as mid-20s) I've been on numerous dates, and even briefly seen the relationship threat level meter teeter around orange for a week or two. :) I've had lots of great experiences in my singles ward, serving in two EQ presidencies, and a year as our ward executive secretary. I've lived in 3 different apartments. I've acquired two new nieces, and seen lots of people I know pick up blogging, although some are more faithful than others. And while I've always been a pretty terrible journal writer, and while most of my blog posts aren't really of that nature either, I at least am glad to have some collected thoughts about the trips I've been on, and other random things that I've experienced.

I think the saddest thing about the blog is that I can no longer find the watch style that the blog was named after. I've been making do with an Armitron that I picked up at Walmart that is functional, but not nearly as enjoyable as the original Big Digital.

1 comment:

CJ said...

Until eclipsed, relationship threat level will be my favorite Big Digital post of all time.

I guess I'm one of the few who are suscribed, although I would refer to us as the select few if it were me.

Hard to believe it's been three years since we came up with the nickname at BigCity Soup in downtown Salt Lake during Emily Fuller (Koon)'s last meal with us. I was off to law school shortly thereafter. My, how time flies.