Here's a conundrum: One of us mice writes a post that's quite fascinating and educational (like, for example, the recent post on native irises). The other mouse sends an excited and congratulatory email. Then we wait for comments -- surely someone must share our excitement! But maybe not. Maybe noone is reading this! Oh no! We're boring! Noone loves us! -- Ah, relief, a comment. Another comment. Mmmm, must be the holidays.
And on the one hand we honestly don't care that much. After all, it's partly about recording what we buy and plant, and besides, we read each other's post. But it's kind of nice to know someone out there is having a look, and maybe they'll divide their irises now, or order some seeds to benefit pollinators. We were both teachers some time long ago, and that probably sticks.
But how can we know whether anybody is reading? Blotanical and Diane from Elephant's Eye to the rescue. On Monday, I thanked Diane for her pick of the Iris post and remarked that we wondering whether anybody is reading. "Oh, just look at the stats," she replied. "What stats?" And here's her answer:
From your blogspot dashboard you can click Stats (that is a recent development) Blogger stats are immediate, right up to 'Now' which is the last 2 hours. Then I use StatCounter for the long term trend - How is my blog doing?
Amazing! We had so many visitors! And they looked at the Iris post, but also at the post about the dusky-footed wood rat. There are many options to display the information, it's just very exciting. Thank you, Diane, and thank you Google.
(First mouse picture from Wikipedia, the other two from The Baldwin Project, Bringing Yesterday's Classic's to Today's Children.)
Comments
As with most things you'll find people viewing your pages but not necessarily finding the time to comment on or, or indeed they have nothing to say!
I know I'm guilty of this, and did read your Iris post - but don't have any Irises other than the dwarf spring flowering types.
Btw, I love the mice illustrations, they remind me of a book we had a child called 'noisy nora' :)
Anyways, thanks for all the comments ;->
It's all a very interesting process which I could not have predicted before I started blogging. As my co-mouse says, we do this also just for ourselves. I can look up this time last year and see what was going on in our respective gardens, or check when I actually did a certain thing, and it's often very helpful.
Thanks, everybody, for reading, and for writing too so we can enjoy reading about your gardens and garden lore.
Must go --- I still have about 300 blog posts to catch up on.
PS Post on blogging and we comment.
I feel like my blog is mostly a journal, so the number of followers is only a secondary motivation to write.
I'm guilty of not commenting too, though I follow your blog. Your post on irises was interesting, but not something that I need to do this year so I just mentally filed it away for reference.
I read nearly every post! Most of the time I have nothing to add as California gardening is something I know little about, another reason I read the blog.
I particularly like the feature on blog tracking websites that tell what "keyword searches" brought visitors to my blog.
Not because the information is particularly useful, but because it's so utterly absurd. Some of our favorites? Searches for "old hot naked ladies" of course!