It has been an interesting month, with notable highs and lows, as well as surprises along the way. When I started writing I feared having no readers. Now I’m humbled to realize I have so many. This was the third month for the blog and daily average readers have grown from 37 in June, to 63 in July to about 104 for August. In three months, over 5,800 visitors tallied over 10,000 page views.
June’s poll drew 13 voters. July’s garnered 71 votes and this month 92 people weighed in on the issue of Nazi protesters. The results showed how split my readers – and I suspect Knoxvillians – are on the issue. Twenty-one people (23%) said we should deny them a permit. Twenty (22%) said do not provide police protection. Twenty-six (28%) said ignore them and twenty-five (27%) said confront them.
My blog on the neo-Nazi event yielded the most visitors for a single day at just over four hundred. It also presented a disturbing surprise: My blog was linked on two racist websites. Apparently, even Nazis like to see their pictures. In each case, I liked the notation to their readers: “Non-Racist Website.” I’ll take that as a compliment and hope some good might come from a visit to my blog.
There were also good surprises. My blog has been linked onto a feed-site in (I believe) Madrid, Spain. It’s a wacky little site on which the author posts pictures of European soccer (football) players and waxes eloquent on the musical virtues of pop-band Hanson. Yes, I’m serious. The best surprise and a debt of gratitude goes out to Josh Flory of the Property Scope blog who gave me a great, and completely unexpected shout-out on his site, here. It resulted in a nice spike of viewers and I really appreciate it.
So, what have I learned this month? I’ve learned that I will have to stop being as compulsive. I’ve kept a list of every city that has accessed my blog (444) and I’m officially letting that go as of the end of this month. I will continue to follow states until I get all fifty (I can’t completely reform – ten to go – does anyone know folks in Hawaii, Maine and North Dakota?), and I’ll continue to monitor countries because I can’t help it (26 so far). I’m also going to have to stop posting nearly every day (if I can), but I will continue to post regularly.
I greatly appreciate people who read regularly, some giving appreciated editing suggestions and some commenting frequently. Thank you to everyone who has become a follower or subscribed to the e-mail service on the right-hand side of the page. If you haven’t done so, please do. If you have links posted on a web-page, Facebook page or blog, please include mine. If you are a member of an e-mail list-serv in which you think the members might be interested, please let them know about the blog.
So that’s it. In simple terms, thank you for reading. Now we’ll get back to talking about that city of ours.