Blog celebrates two-year anniversary today with 1,016th post

As hard as it is to believe, I started this blog two years 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 39,504 times during the past two years. That breaks down to about 16,46 page views per month or about 380 page views per week.

Over the past two years, I posted 1,016 blog entries, and most of them (aside from my daily weather observations) were about 500 words long.

The Top 10 posts of the past two years were as follows:

1. Amp Energy drink lacks punch of Monster – April 19, 2010 (2,156 views)
2. Moosehead Lager – so tasty that its theft has been the subject of books - Dec. 10, 2010 (417 views)
3. My movie picks this week are ‘The Rum Diary’ and ‘Captain America’ - Oct. 26, 2011 (355 views)
4. My movie picks this week are ‘Fast Five and ‘3 Idiots’ - April 27, 2011 (295 views)
5. NG’s 100 Best Adventure Books – April 17, 2010 (266 views)
6. ‘Ghost Hunters’ visit Pennhurst Asylum in last night’s new episode - March 3, 2011 (235 views)
7. Which Clive Cussler book is your all-time favorite? – May 9, 2011 (196 views)
8. Dean Koontz knocks Stephen King from top of best-sellers list this week - Jan. 8, 2012 (141 views)
9. Bookreporter.com names Book of the Year, Favorite Books of 2010 - Dec. 21, 2010 (139 views)
10. Magic Eight Ball gives answers to December’s slate of pressing questions – Dec. 8, 2011 (92 views)

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 Germany, Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, Russia, Hong Kong, France, Romania and Slovenia.

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 two years 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.”