Friday, May 13, 2011

Nonsense, rants and the passage of a year

Oh how time flies when you’re having fun! It’s been a year – that’s right, a year – since I logged onto Blogger for the very first time and memorably decided to create a site called This&That.

I can now report that I’ve held true to my mission, posting mostly a bunch of nonsense, a few reviews and rants, the occasional update on my mom and lots of stuff on Judaism and Israel. Oh, right, and all those postings on my love of nature, critters, the royal family and yard work!

My efforts have been hugely popular or embarrassingly futile and simple – depends on your point of view and how you define success. Here are a few numbers that say something about my efforts; I’m just not exactly sure what.

I’ve managed to post 165 stories in the last year, attracting 9,584 visits and a whopping 14,395 page views. I have absolutely no idea if that’s good or bad. I do know that major sites – The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast and Salon – have annual page views in the billions.

Nearly 75 percent of folks visiting my site are from North America and about 75 percent of those visitors are from the U.S. No big surprise, right? Another 5 percent are from Europe; 1 percent is from Asia – I’m guessing mostly from Israel. I’ve also had visitors from Australia and New Zealand; Russia and China; the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Egypt; South Africa, England, Germany, France, Spain, Norway and Iceland.

Since I don’t know if what I’m doing is good or bad and have no plans to carry out focus groups anytime soon to find out, I’m declaring victory. I’ll be asking my board of directors to approve a substantial pay increase for the, ah, staff, including additional stock options. All that will happen just as soon as I create a board of directors, which I plan on doing right after I finish cleaning the toilets and mowing the lawn.

I’d sign off quoting my blog’s memorable slogan. But we don’t actually have a slogan just yet. That is one of the first topics of business I plan to bring up before our new board. Wish me luck.

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