While writing my post about the RedHawks loss, I looked and saw that I’m closing in on the 400 post mark. Now the consecutive numbering system that my pages go by has passed the 400 mark (this one will be number 404) but there’s been a few test posts and such along the line as well as “pages” which get a number but aren’t in order and link categories which also get a number. (And sometimes I go out of order as I do drafts for future post publication.) I had many category names for the last election that are no longer on monoblogue, which accounts for the bulk of the difference. I’m also close to 500 saved comments, although my Akismet program has shelved over 20,000 spam messages. Fortunately for my sanity, I’ve made sure that all but a handful have been vaporized into the ether. (It’s only made three mistakes so far but I always check just to make sure.)
And over the weekend I should get my 30,000th visitor according to my Site Meter. It may not seem like a whole lot but when I looked it also showed me that the last 7 days should be a new record week as I close in on 1,500 for the week. I was quite pleased that I had over 1,000 visitors that actually registered as reading my site last week, particularly when I was down for 29 hours and that outage covered one of my prime readership periods twice. This is not just a hit counter, it’s actual visitors.
My website’s server also tracks monoblogue visitors and for some reason that portion was down for 14 days at the end of February and into March (probably related to my server outage which occurred at the end of that time.) Since coming back, that counter is telling me I have an average for the month of about 850 visitors a day (who seem to leave spam messages!) and that’s a record high, as is my daily hit rate of over 3,700. If I went by the “valid” figures and added even a conservative average for the 14 day outage, I should’ve gotten my 150,000th visitor recently.
But I also needed an excuse to work in a welcome to the two newest members of the Maryland Blogger Alliance. We’ve added Snail’s Tales out of Germantown, where Aydin places a heavy emphasis on the world of science (much like The Voltage Gate), and we also added The Greenbelt which is written out of Laurel, MD. “The Ridger”, as she is known, writes from a perspective of “language, liberalism, freethinking”. I’d place her sort of along the lines of Stephanie of Jousting for Justice.
I mentioned The Greenbelt last because it segues into my next point. She will be hosting the upcoming Carnival of Maryland #3 (not this coming Sunday, but Sunday the 25th) and we’ll see if I can get something into three in a row here. In case you missed it (and if you did, shame on you!) here are Carnival #1 (hosted by Crablaw) and Carnival #2 courtesy of Pillage Idiot. Both feature a monoblogue submission as well as many other good ones. And please note that you don’t have to be in the Maryland Bloggers Alliance to be posted.
So that brings you up to speed on both the local scene and the MBA. I’m actually going to postdate this post by about 24 hours so I can take some time on monoblogue this weekend and do non-writing things like update the links list, see about putting a Carnival of Maryland box on my sidebar, and work on a couple rather lengthy future posts. I’ve gotten a bit smarter in the almost two years (my blogiversary of my original blog – yet another milestone – is April 1st) that I’ve done this writing and one thing I’ve learned is spacing your posts out is good practice. This way readers get “fresh red meat” and a reason to come back often!
Editor’s note: At 11:23 a.m. this morning, someone hopped out of Delmarva Dealings and became my 30,000th visitor. Then they went to carbonfootprint.com. It was a local person because I believe the 71.200.xxx.xxx “exchange” is exclusively on Delmarva via Comcast (it’s my IP address too.)
