My 100th Blog Post!

 This is my 100th blog post on this blog! That feels like quite a milestone. I know that compared to most other websites, only 100 pages / posts isn't really that many, but when I think about how much time and effort went into creating 100 pieces of content, it does feel like an accomplishment. It took a while to get here, but at least I made it.

I wanted to do something different for this 100th post, something which specifically notes the fact that it is the 100th post. I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do, so I did some browsing of other bloggers' 100th/200th/300th milestone blog posts for inspiration. It seemed like a lot of them were basically thanking the readership of those blogs for reading, and explaining how much writing the blog has meant to them. I like both of those things, so I'll include them in this post.

Thanks to all who have visited my blog! This blog is not very popular (yet!), and so not all that many people have visited. But to those who have, you are the reason I write on this blog. Thank you!

I enjoy writing this blog, but I do have hopes that other people will read what I write. I have next to no desire to write my thoughts in a paper notebook just to fill up the pages and set it on a shelf in my basement. I want to know others have read it, and hopefully receive comments on my writing. I hope for feedback. But all that acknowledged as motivation, the act of writing for this blog is enjoyable in itself. It's fun to explore what it is I think and feel about the things I write about, and to have a sort of time capsule of my own thoughts and development to look back on.

So that takes care of what I saw written in most of the "100th" blog posts. But I also wanted to do a bit of a blog traffic report with this post. Share how long I've been blogging and what kind of traffic I've seen in that time.

I posted my first blog post to this site on February 11th, 2017. Back then I was hoping this site would be a portfolio for my digital art. I had photoshop, and enjoyed making random, fairly abstract, art. And I planned to post those images here. That did not last very long. I only posted 6 blog posts like that before I stopped.

I didn't post again until June 22nd, 2019. Over 2 years went by without a post. Quite a long break! When I started posting again, the intent of the blog had completely changed. I was now going to write articles about any and everything that I wanted to write about. No specific theme or niche. And no longer anything to do with art. The blog name was originally "Creative Works of Wayne W Walls", but I dropped the "Creative Works of" part at some point, as it was no longer relevant/accurate.

I have been posting on and off since then. I usually get hit with some motivation, post consistently for a few weeks, then taper off and let a few months go by with nothing published. That has been the pattern. I am currently in one of those high motivation stretches of a few weeks of consistency, but am hoping that this time it doesn't fade, and I will instead have months or years of regular blog posts. We'll see.

Today is September 4th, 2023, so it has taken me around 6.5 years to reach 100 blog posts. Glad I finally made it, but man is that too long to have written 100 blog posts. I am hoping to pick up the pace with these posts and maybe reach the next 100th milestone (200 blog posts) much sooner - maybe in a year. 100 posts per year is only about 2 per week, which seems pretty doable.

So with 100 blog posts over the course of 6.5 years, how many visitors has this blog seen? Well, this data is going to be pretty poor quality and fairly inaccurate, but at least it'll be something to compare to in the future. I believe the industry standard tool for measure website traffic is Google Analytics. Like when you need to prove to an ad network or content sponsorship partner how much traffic your site receives, they want to see your numbers using Google Analytics. I signed up for Google Analytics a few years into blogging, so I don't have data all the way back to day one. But even for the time I do have it, I don't know how to use the tool very well. And within the last few months Google Analytics has upgraded to a new version which doesn't import data from past years, so its kind of a clean slate. And I have found the new version of GA to be much harder to use than the old version.

But even with the limited data set, I believe Google Analytics says I have received a few hundred visitors in all that time. That is pretty terrible for how long its been up. But I've got to believe there have been more than that, and I'm just reading it wrong or I set it up incorrectly.

I publish this blog through Blogger / Blogspot, and it includes a stats section for your blog when you log in. It shows the basic stuff like page views, visitors, the countries your visitors are from, and what websites are referring visitors to your site. I like the numbers from this visitor counter much better, but I believe they are a bit inflated. I believe it counts all bot traffic. So like the web crawlers sent out by Google to index the internet, when they visit a page to download the content, I believe that counts as a visit. I would not count that as legitimate traffic, and neither would ad networks or content sponsorship partners, but its built into the number I am provided, so it's what I can share here.

According to the built in traffic counter in Blogger, this site has received 43,000 pageviews. Even if most of those visits are actually bots, maybe 10,000 of them are real pageviews from actual people. No way to know for sure. 

But I much prefer the idea that somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 people have viewed my site than the GA number of less than 1,000. But either way, I would love that number to be much higher. Hopefully as I continue to push up the publishing frequency here, my traffic will continue to grow. Can't wait to see what the numbers are on my 200th blog post!




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