Monday, May 04, 2009

Popular

I have never been "popular." In highschool I was a nerd with few (very few) friends. As an adult I have quite a few dog friends. But in blogger world I am down right popular!

My first blog post was May 20, 2005. When I first started my blog I started it with the intention of using it to keep track of my training. My first blog post was nothing special. Just a short note about what the dogs were doing. I started out slow, and then even slower, and then in the last year have become a blogger addict. As of yesterday I had published 588 blog posts.

My blog is my outlet- and has helped me through lots of stuff- I recently went through and read almost all of it. And yes, it took me a long time! I found posts that I had forgotten about, and it was so cool to be able to see the changes in myself, my dogs, and my training. I thought it would be neat to read about my life- and it was; Almost losing Wicca to Parvo, Wicca's First trial, the passing of my old dog Tina, Sam's first AAC trial- resulting in a Title, a new dog- Vito, the first Terry Simons seminar, and frustration of Sam's injury- all in one post!!, another new dog- Boone, our first Nationals Event, the devastating loss of Sam (I cried when I read his post), and more recently the happiness and excitement of baby Pixel....

I write about whatever I want- my dogs, my life, my job, and my interests(which are usually dog related!) My main reason for the blog is still training. I am not an organised person by nature and the blog has helped me with that. Saying that, I have always loved to write, and consider myself funny. I am sarcastic, bossy, and opinionated. Which usually makes for interesting reading! You keep coming back don't you??? It can't be just for the cute dog photos...can it?

I have no idea how many total visitors I've had to the blog- I wish that I would have installed a counter when I first published the blog. It would be interesting to know. I do know that I have a lot of readers. To be honest- some days it creeps me out. And other days I think it's cool. Mostly though, I don't really think about it.

Anyway, I reinstalled something called Google Analytics just a few weeks ago. It tracks all sorts of things- total visitors, how often visitors return, if they were referred from another site, etc. etc. (Again, kind of creepy if you think about it...)

From April 16 until May 2 I have had 2,089 visits to the blog. Pretty astounding. Now, not all of those are new people- lots of them are "frequent readers" so to speak. But still. I feel popular.

It makes you wonder how people find you. I mean, I have my blog address in my email signature- so essentially everyone I email could check it out. Lots of people are referred from a different site- reading other peoples blog-rolls have certainly increased the ones I read regularly! I remember when I first started blogging I could only find two or three cardigan blogs- Now there are a ton! And then other people google me. Cool. And creepy all at the same time.

Even people that I know, but aren't really "friends" with, read the blog. People at trials come up to me and tell me how entertaining I am. Customers at work tell me how cute my dogs are. I am usually too flabbergasted to say much except "Thank You."

So Thanks to all my readers. For being a part of something that started out so small, and has since become a great outlet for me. Blogging has made the world so small, and I feel that I know so many more people. Oh, and I won't lie and say that it doesn't feel good to be "popular" - because it totally does! :o) So thanks again! You guys rock!

6 comments:

Lauren said...

I do really enjoy your blog and I'm miles away... somehow through blog rolls I got to all the fun agility blogs. As a newbie to agility, it keeps me looking forward to when I will actually know what you're talking about when you hit agility lingo. Keep bloggin' - we're reading!

onecollie said...

I just come back for the cute pictures !....hee hee!!

Jules said...

It is a weird thing to discover people you would never expect to even find your blog ... read it. You're right - it's both a little creepy and a little cool. Keep up the good work. I really enjoy your blog!

Elf said...

I made my first blog post in August 2002. My hope was to find a diary tool that I could easily use to track my life with my agility dogs. It didn't occur to me to tell anyone about it until my dog's cancer was diagnosed a few months later and it became an easy way to post updates that people could read or not.

Then I discovered that, if you put your interests into your blogger profile, they turned into links that matched up with other people with similar interests. Cool technology! Found a few agility folks that way. Almost all the others I've found have grown out of that--someone posts a comment on a blog that I read, and the comment is interesting, so I follow the link back to their blog. Or someone has a list of blogs that htey follow and I check them out and add the likely prospects to my list. Or someone I know posts a comment to my blog, and I then explore the person I know online and find his/her blog.

It amazes me how many people have enough time to read other people's blogs. (Um... me, of course, I don't spend any time doing it...) And most of them never seem to post comments. People come up to me at trials on a fairly regular basis--sometimes people I barely know--and say, "I love your blog!" Makes me feel competent--and popular. ;-)

But it also makes me more aware of the fact that lots of people are reading about my experiences and my thoughts and my health and so on, and so my "personal diary" is very carefully moderated by me to ensure that I don't say something that I might regret later in any way, shape, or form. Like, I seldom comment about my health unless it's a very public health issue AND blatantly affects my agility AND isn't something that I'm concerned that some future insurer or employer or partner or... whatever... might find and be unhappy about.

I like your photos. In fact, I love posts that are mostly photos in any blog because they're much faster to read. :-) I, of course, usually post long-winded text and not much in the way of photos. Kind of like this here.

-ellen

Anonymous said...

ellen-

I am always careful about blogging stuff that could hurt later. Especially now that there are so MANY readers I am more careful. Naming names, ranting, complaining, etc are all done very carefully!

i love photos. especially of my own dogs. before I had access to a camera (and later was given my own) there were barely any photos on the blog...now there are a lot...maybe too many!!!

;o)

Sue said...

I started blogging as a journal with pictures. I've never been very good about keeping up with a journal, but now if I skip a couple days I have people emailing me to see if I'm OK.

It is kind of weird to think about strangers reading my posts and when the Obamas got a PWD, my hits went thru the ceiling. I had hundreds of hits from all over the world. I'm glad that didn't last long.