Hello! Nice to see you…all 1010 of you!

One of the lovely things about writing all this was discovering that it was read by more than just me, the Bear and those friends who specifically wanted to know what I was doing.

It was a surprise really. When I look back at the early posts, there were comments from my friends and I really thought that would be it. I hadn’t really even thought of the layout of the blog – I’d just chosen a theme that looked like scraps of paper because that’s what my recipe book looked like. There was no need, or so I thought, for anything other than that.

I’d chosen WordPress because when I’d Googled “best blog software” that was what came up. All I can say is that (as I haven’t used any other software) WordPress is quick and easy and has been perfect for me. You can add what they call “widgets” or “plug ins” which put extra information on the blog.

I started by putting on a Tag Cloud – you can see that on the far right – the more often a word is tagged, the bigger the word gets in the cloud. From that you’ll get some kind of idea what kind of cooking goes on in here… butter and double cream seem to be featured quite a lot….

No real plan, you see.

Yet it evolved. Nearly eleven months later there’s been quite a change.

More and more people started reading the blog and I got more and more interested in seeing the growth. I discovered that if you added Feedjit to the blog, you could see where people were coming from.

See that central column, with Live Feed at the head of it? That’s Feedjit. It tells me roughly where people are coming from and what they are reading… don’t worry, it doesn’t identify you, it just says roughly where your internet provider is. I can see when my brother or his wife check in as their home town shows up. Sometimes I recognise the locations of my friends and that is such a great feeling.  My friend Angela moved to the USA well over a year ago and whenever I see Kennesaw, Georgia pop up, I know it is likely to be her. She doesn’t live in Kennesaw by the way, which is what I mean when I say it doesn’t show exact locations.

I can sometimes work out who is looking (or has looked in the time window that Feedjit is showing me) by the locations and the comments posted. My blogging friends turn up regularly and there’s always that little jump of excitement. Sometimes I see the same location pop up and I have no idea who is there. San Antonio, for instance… hello, San Antonio! I’ve seen your location popping up for months but I don’t think you have ever commented.

You can look at it on a map, too… oh the sheer excitement when I saw little flags popping up, first in the UK where my immediate friends were, then the USA and Canada… and then the rest of the world.

If you look at the bottom of the Feedjit column, you can see there’s a menu option.

Go on, go to that and pick Live Traffic Map – you can look at the information, too!

It shows you the daily traffic across the world.

That’s you lot, that is. Well, that’s you lot as I write this. It will change of course.

You can zoom in and see more clearly where people are and if you hover over a flag you can see what people are reading there. Isn’t that fantastic?  I look at the map every day and I’m permanently amazed that people from all over the world call in.  I hope you all like it.

I added a little heart button as a widget so people could click if they liked what I’d written and that changes the Most Liked Posts. If you want to see what they are, look in the far right column. At the moment it is Plate of Beef, the delicious slow roasted hunk of meat that I love to cook for friends. If you read a post you like, click the heart and change the ratings!

Next, I added a Blogroll – a list of links to my favourite blogs. If you get bored reading my blog, look at the list and see if there’s anything there that takes your fancy. I can while away many a happy hour just reading what my friends (and yes, I feel like they are my friends now) have been writing. I’ve had some great ideas from them and maybe you’ll find some there, too.

When I started this, the Bear set up a website to host the blog on and for the past eleven months that’s all it did. There was nothing on the page, it just took you here.

But now, if you go to www.wendall.org  you get to the home page and that gives you links to the blog, to Facebook, to Twitter and even methods of contacting me, if you want to do that. You can save that as a web page and use that to navigate to various sections.

Twitter feed shows up there too as well as the last five posts I’ve written.

The Bear, being a computer genius, even managed to put a random post picker on there… you just click and a random selection of posts, that have been written since the blog started, pop up. If you haven’t been reading since the beginning (or even if you have) give that a go.

I’m really very pleased with it all.

Yesterday, though, was perhaps the best day of all.

There’s another section that covers the statistics. The bit that interested me the most was the amount of unique visitors.

What that means is that it monitors not how many times the pages are looked at but how many separate people come here in each month.

On my first month I was amazed to find there were 200 or so. The numbers crept up slowly and yesterday? Well yesterday, when I looked at Awstats, this is what I saw.

Yesterday, I broke the 1000 barrier! And it’s not even the end of the month yet.

Apparently my squeal of excitement was heard in the next office.

So, thank you. Thank you ALL 1010 of you.

Come and say hello, even if it is just to say where you are from. Explore the pages and share the excitement with me. I wonder how things will have changed by the time I get to the first anniversary?

I hope you’ll all still be here.