Blog Purpose

I'm not sure what the purpose of a blog is. I enjoy writing one, as long as it is on my own schedule and I don't need to cater to the whims of others. After all, it's my blog - the only whim I should cater to is my own.

To date I have 241 posts, and 38 of those are Draft versions that I may or may not post (37 without saved titles). Some are too introspective and others too boring. Some are simply files I tried to capture from one of the computers I decommissioned and I thought I might be able to make a post of them someday.

I started writing on my blog on 5/10/2011 when my Dear Daughter said if I didn't start a blog she would take the name O-Dark-Thirty. My first blog post was the written version of the short speech I gave the church on our mission trip to Africa. It is still one of my favorite posts (and it was an awesome trip).

I don't have categories on all my posts. I didn't learn about those until just a few months ago. I went back in time and added some categories, but I sure wasn't comprehensive.

I have fourteen posts that I categorized with Mom. Of those, one is also categorized Inspirational and three are categorized Cooking. I have nineteen that I categorized Family, but some of those have Mom as well. I have thirty that I categorized Inspirational and I hope some of them are. Probably my favorite among those is Courage. I have two that I put the category Bible on, and nine with Church Sermons. I have eighteen that I labeled Just Funny. There are twelve with Darling and four of those have to do with Moving. I have seven posts that speak of finances and I like them all, but my two favorites are Finances and You and The One $ Rule. The latter one is the one piece of advice I wish my children would learn and follow financially.

My top three commented posts have to do with my family and my Mom, two of them about growing up in Michigan. There are four parts to that story, but people didn't comment as much on the latter two parts.

The number of views is probably skewed due to the number of edits I had to do with some of the posts, though I tried to exclude my count (Blogspot has a setting for that).

Not surprisingly my top viewed post is the one where we published The Fiscal Cliff last October. We sent most of our church members there to get the book, so there are over 150 views. Surprisingly, my second highest viewing has (currently) 119 views for my post on The Hero's Journey, but people might be confusing me with Joseph Campbell, I suppose. The third and fourth highest viewed postings deal with My Mother-in-law Misadventures and The Frau Chronicles. I have almost one hundred views for Software Eulogy - This is One Ugly Posting which is a technical post for cleaning up a netbook. I hope it helped people. My Yearly Financial Tuneup got over fifty views and I'll probably post updates on that one every January. It helped me a little and maybe it helped others.

I have 3607 total views, although the Blogger stats shows a total of over 11,500 views. I'm not sure why I have such a discrepancy. Overall I average about 17 views for each post, but that's misleading because of a few high numbers. My median for all my post viewings is 12, with 101 posts viewed higher than that. My post on Electric Cars only had thirteen views, but it was fun to write - I saw a Tesla that inspired it, and was curious how the costs per mile really shook out.

My post for WWII documents received 79 views, almost seventy of them in the first three hours of the posting, and almost all from Europe. That astounded me.

The hardest one to write, or possible the most transparent, was one I called Pain Lingers in 2011. It garnered only an average number of views, but my brother put a fabulous comment on it, one that warmed my heart. He's a great guy and a compliment from him means a lot to me.

I can't evaluate a pattern of who reads what posting. I don't know what categories my readers like. One brother told me that if I posted more family stories more of my family would read them. Maybe that happened. I actually can't tell from the statistics.

So I don't know who my readers are, and I don't really know what they want me to write about.

Which is cool, actually, because I can simply continue to write what I want and hope they help some people.

<Added: On the other hand, I'm not a blogging superstar because I don't follow the correct formula!>