An Old Year Ends

Well, this should be the last post of the year, and year’s end is always a time for reflection.

It was almost a full year ago that I first began this little blog about heraldry. The very first entry was posted on January 19, 2009, and we all have come a long way since then. I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to keep to my commitment to post at least twice a week, and have been able to exceed it some weeks.

I’ve been surprised at the wide geographic spread of those of you who drop by the blog. As you can see from the ClusterMap of where visitors to the blog come from, the readership comes from literally around the world. (None of the tools I have available to keep track of traffic to the blog gives me any information about any of my readers more specific than the internet service provider being used and city, region or country.) I have to admit, the visitor from Fiji was a bit of a surprise, until I found out (on Facebook, if I remember correctly) that a regular reader had been vacationing there.

We’ve gone from a beginning readership of 18 visits (not necessarily visitors; someone coming back would have appeared as a separate visit) last January to our current volume of over 600 visits a month. I don’t think that this number will cause any of the large blogs to worry that I’m about to knock them out of their ranking, but it’s very impressive to me, and certainly beyond my expectations when I began.

The latest traffic data I have to look at for the blog has visitors staying from well under a minute (just checking to see if there’s anything new, I assume) to over an hour (someone was apparently catching up from the earliest posts). The average visit length as of the time I write this is just a little over three minutes.

We’ve recently added two more “Followers” of the blog, bringing our total to fourteen, only two or three of which are members of my family. ;-^) These are folks who have signed up to receive automatic notifications when something new has been posted.

In the face of all this growth from just a year ago, I would like to take this opportunity to thank each of you for dropping by, for reading what I have to say, for leaving the occasional comment or for emailing me about a post. I hope that you have found, if not every single one, at least some of the posts to be educational, entertaining, and/or thought-provoking.

For the future, I will continue to try to meet my self-imposed goal of posting at least twice a week, try to keep the posts interesting and educational, and will continue to add useful and interesting websites to the lists of links down the sidebar in the hope that this blog will become a resource for you.

Thank you for helping make this year just past and wonderful one for me, and I look forward to your dropping by the blog in the coming year.