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| Happy Half-Birthday. | | Date Created: Feb 23, 2005, 12:17 PM |
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Today is my blog's half-birthday, meaning I started it 6 months ago.
The chart above (click on it to enlarge) shows the site statistics for the last 6 months. Pretty interesting, I'd say. Notice, for example, the weekly dips, which occur every Saturday and Sunday. From these dips, I have found that there's no reason to post entries on the weekend, because no one is reading them. Nothing in my life is so important that I must absolutely post it that day.
Unless it's stroopwafels. The Starbucks down the street has started selling stroopwafels, which they called "Dutch caramel wafers." Now I know you're not excited about this, but I am. See...stroopwafels (pronounced: stroop' vaf els) are the only culinary contribution made by the Dutch (other than some decent chocolate.) I myself am not Dutch, but in Western Michigan, where I went to college, there are MANY 2nd or 3rd generation Dutch people... (See, a little more than a hundred years ago, a large group of Dutch people got kicked out of the Netherlands for being jackasses. This was called the"afscheiding," or separation. Most of them settled in Michigan, but others settled in Pella, Iowa, and a few in Canada and California.)
Anyway...a stroopwafel is a thin wafer, like an ice cream cone, but flat. Then it's covered in caramel with another wafer on top. To eat them, you place the whole mess over the open lid of your coffee (or other warm beverage) so the steam makes the caramel very gooey. Then you eat them. Very yummy. And I used to eat them all the time, when I was at Calvin. (No, not ALL the time, but often.) But, I haven't seen them in Ann Arbor since I moved here.
See, things like that are too important to wait to post. And if I had discovered the stroopwafels on a Saturday, I would have posted it. But it's unlikely I'd stumble across something that important on a weekend.
Anyway, the fact that people don't seem to read this blog on Saturdays and Sundays leads me to believe that many people read this blog from work. To those of you squandering your companies' resources by reading this train-wreck of a blog, I say, "Well done!"
As you might imagine, I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I will have 100 returning daily visitors, which will happen in 1163 days (that's only 3.186 years plus or minus 0.004 days!) according to the linear regression I performed on the returning visitors stats. (For the truly geeky among you, the R Squared is 0.716.)
There was, a while back, a fair amount of discussion in the blogger communities that I frequent about the reasons people blog. There was much navel gazing. Many people claim they "only blog for themselves" which of course requires one to ask, "So why post it?"
A friend discussed his reasons for blogging recently, and I then explained my reasons for blogging in a comment on his blog. Then I noted that I should blog about his blogging about blogging because I'm just that kinda sucker for M.C. Escher-self-referential-postmodern-crap. So in case you're wondering why I've kept this blog for 6 months so far:
1) I do a fair amount of writing in grad school, which I enjoy, but it's mundane scientific writing. So, my blog is mostly writing practice -- getting the chance to use a style that I don't get to use every day.
2) I have some friends who have moved here or there around the country, and this is a way to keep in touch. They'll see something and email me about it, etc...
2.5) There's a group of cool people who I've gotten to connect with through blogging, and I've even gotten to see pictures of some of their penises. (See how I need practice in writing? It sounds like I've seen some of the penises of other bloggers, as if they have a large collection, but I've only seen some of them. Instead, what I meant to say is that I've seen pictures of the penises of some bloggers. Still glad you're reading this at work?)
3) And sometimes, there's lots more there there. My blog is like an onion. (It smells bad? No. It makes people cry? No.) It has layers. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar and sometimes a blog post about t-shirts is only a blog post about t-shirts. However, there are lots of posts that, on the surface, look pretty...well, superficial, but underneath tell you a lot about who I am and what makes me laugh and what makes me angry and what I love and what matters to me. Plus there's viewing the blog entry by entry, but there's also the sum of all the entries that tells you even more, I think.
Which brings me (naturally) back to the site statistics. In order for you to really understand the deep complexity of this blog in all it's ... complexness, it is important that you return daily. Otherwise you could miss something. Really! Like this post. And then you'd never know what a stroopwafel was, or how to eat them.
OK, I admit it...I just blog to get chicks. |
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