What a crazy 200 posts they’ve been. There has been laughter, tears, anger, disappointment… and that’s just in response to my jokes. (oh, did I mention groans) I must admit – when I started this deal out, I didn’t really expect to see this blogging thing through for any length of time: I’d had a go or two before and they’d died pretty quickly. It’s been pretty full on to see how much this blog has become a part of my process of working through things, as well as just a part of my daily life.
To tell you the truth, I think that as soon as I got linked to from Scott and Christina’s blog (http://www.rangescc.org/wordpress/ if you haven’t gone there from any of my previous thousands of plugs) I really wanted to take this thing seriously. Inspired by places like Living Room, Signposts, Soul Soujourn, Gaddabout and the North Harbour Blog (although it’s been ages since you’ve posted anything John!) I got pretty excited by the prospect of writing down some of my thoughts and seeing if people would be interested enough in reading them.
A quiet word from Scott about the vineyard blogroll got me linked on there, and suddenly people like Rick (check out his blog too – he’s always got good stuff to say) started commenting, and I even felt like there was a reason to get really excited. But the constraints of http://geoff.wordpress.com were all too much, I had to get my own domain! (for non-tech heads – that’s the address you type into the text box at the top of the computer screen :P) So not long after having got the whole thing going, (and actually having achieved a PageRank above 0) I shifted the blog to http://www.geoffreport.com! Good decision. Now I had many more ways to waste my time. There were templates to play around with, statistics to collect (in about 1000 different ways) and plugins to install.
Which is how I got here. There have been some interesting times along the way – I’m continually amazed at the steady increase in traffic over time (amazing how interested people suddenly become when there’s the hint of romance in the air). And the appeal has always blown me away – Asta my loyal Lithuanian reader (from back in the wordpress.com days) and Rick have made me an internationally acclaimed author (well…. close anyway).
But overall, I’m mostly doing this because it’s fun, and because I think that I’m learning about God, and drawing closer to him. As much as this might freak people out, there is definitely a sense that the blogosphere is quickly becoming a community, and it’s an opportunity to share ideas with people that you can’t share with easily in any other format. It might not quite be a brave new world, but it’s at very least a whole new city.
So, in the spirit of such a contrived milestone, and the self-congratulatory nature of the post, here’s some GeoffRe(y)port facts for you….
Most Read Posts
- On a more personal matter - …you sneaky little voyeurs. You know who you are
- Rob Bell’s “Velvet Elvis” - Some thoughts (first post to really get some decent search-engine generated traffic)
- Being the White Knight – Because everyone really does love a fairy tale!
- IE7 Beta Review – Managed to get a trackback fairly high on the IE Blog’s IE 7 announcement post – drove a lot of traffic my way.
- Transparent Blogging – Think it was just the hang arounds from “On a more personal matter”
It will surprise very few of you that the most frequent commenter (other than myself) has been the lovely Bec – 58 comments and counting! She is followed by Sam (also quite lovely :P), Rick (nope, no chance I’m going to call you lovely mate) then Scott and Christina. In the 200 posts so far, there have been 378 comments (plus 29 comments on the old site). 37 different people have commented so far.
There have been visitors on the blog from every continent except South America (although we’ve had a couple of Carribean readers) and Antarctica. Visitors have come from 21 different countries. Australia, USA, Germany, Lithuania and the UK mostly (in that order). About a quarter of you get referred here from Bec’s blog. It’s been a fun ride - and hopefully it’ll keep being fun for a while yet.
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What I find interesting is the weird things that people put into search engines and somehow find you. Any gems there geoff? Christina gets alot of ‘Calvinist t-shirts’
No absolute rippers, I seem to get a lot of people here through spelling mistakes/typos. If you mis-spell mischievous to be “mischevieous” then for a while I was the top response (I foolishly fixed the spelling). I get a lot of people looking for Rob Bell, with all sorts of different combinations. And I get people looking for Richmond players’ names.
Keep it up, Geoff. I’m very glad to be part of this “new city”
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