Blog celebrates one-year anniversary

As hard as it is to believe, I started this blog one year ago today. In other words, Happy Birthday, Blog!

The blog went through a couple of name changes in its early days, and I missed a day or two along the way, but all and all, I missed very few days thanks to my rampant, undiagnosed OCD personality.

One of the cool things about having a blog through Blogger is that you can monitor the traffic to your blog from behind the scenes.

According to my blog’s stats page, it was viewed 7,134 times during the past year. That breaks down to about 595 page views per month or about 137 page views per week.

Over the past year, I posted 398 blog entries, and most of them were about 500 words long. The most popular post of the year was my Dec. 21, 2010 post entitled “Bookreporter.com names Book of the Year, Favorite Books of 2010.” I think that it was linked from someone else’s web site, which generated most of the traffic to that particular post.

The Top 10 posts of the year were as follows:

1. Bookreporter.com names Book of the Year, Favorite Books of 2010 – Dec. 21, 2010
2. The Monroe Journal wants to know ‘Is the old Carter Hospital haunted?’ – Nov. 4, 2010
3. AP Literature recommended reading list – Sept. 25, 2010
4. Publishers Weekly’s ‘All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books’ list – Aug. 31, 2010
5. Barnes & Noble releases ‘Best Books of 2010’ list – Dec. 4, 2010
6. Stephen King’s ‘Full Dark, No Stars’ appears on bestseller list – Nov. 21, 2010
7. Top 10 Spookiest Places in Conecuh County, Alabama – Oct. 21, 2010
8. New R.A. Salvatore book appears on bestseller list – Oct. 17, 2010
9. 2010 Great American Beer Festival gold medal winners named – Oct. 1, 2010
10. Cussler’s ‘Crescent Dawn’ appears on hardcover bestsellers list – Dec. 5, 2010

The stats page also tells me where visitors to my blog live. While the vast majority of them live in the U.S., most of the other visitors hailed from Russia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, France, Denmark and China.

I look forward to keeping the blog going for as long as I can, and I hope to live up to what I said I hoped to accomplish in that first blog post a year ago today:

“The main purpose of this new blog is to help me keep and maintain the meager writing skills that I have and journalistically document some of my new experiences. I hope you’ll find it interesting.

“My intention is to keep the content light-hearted and informative, and I hope it’ll encourage others to have and share their own experiences. When I speak of new experiences I’m talking about meeting people I’ve never met before, going places I’ve never gone and doing things that I’ve never done. Much of what you’ll find here will be information about new books that I’ve read, restaurants I’ve never visited, celebrities that I happen to meet (if any), food I’ve never tried, events I’ve never attended (like festivals and sporting events), places (like state parks and hiking trails) and movies I’ve seen for the first time.

“You’ll also find that I’m big on lists. I’ve always been drawn to “bucket” lists, top 10 lists of things to do, go, eat and see, as well as recommended reading lists and best-of lists. If you run across any lists like these, feel free to share them.

“In the end, I hope that none of you find this blog to be boring or too self-indulgent. If so, then I’ve failed in what I’ve set out to do, and I’ll need to tighten up.”