Blog tidbits...

In slightly more than two weeks we will be moving back to the States and I doubt that I will add new posts to the blog. I might keep the blog going for awhile since most of my hits are on older posts (like the one post I did on Jane Mansfield which still gets a lot of hits). I will probably start another blog on another topic, but if I do I will do it anonymously and it won't deal my family.

Even as I approach the mothballing of the blog, though, there are some significant milestones to savor. As I write this the original hit counter (the small one at the bottom of the left hand side of the blog), which was up and running within a few days of when the blog began in April of 2007, is at 9,997 and I expect it to hit 10,000 by the end of the day. 10,000 hits. If you had asked me when I started if I would reach 10,000 I would have said sure, in 2012. Of course, the daily traffic started quite small and grew over time as there was more content to found by Google searches. So while I have reached 10,000 hits 14 months, I am currently averaging about 1,000 hits a month and about 75% of these hits are first timers, not returning friends and family.

This post is also number 396 and I will hit 400 in the next few days. That's an average of just under one per day (about 93% of the days I add a post), and many of the posts were pretty lame, but at least there was a wide variety of lameness.

I have now had visitors from 96 individual countries or territories (e.g. Puerto Rico and the Palestinian territories) and just yesterday had my first visitor from Iran (also brought to the blog thanks to the post on Jane Mansfield). It proves what a wonderful tool Google is that so many people can find my little blog about this and that. But I never in a million years thought I could reach countries of more than half the planet.

My plan is to convert many of my posts into a book via blurb.com. This is a self-publishing web site that is linkable to some blogs (fortunately, blogger is one of them) so I can create a publisher quality coffee table book of our time in Prague as keepsake.

I have really enjoyed writing the blog and hope that when you stopped by you found something interesting. It was a great learning experience for me and I now feel I could start a blog about anything that interests me and be able to make the blog look good and have interesting features. Thanks for your support.