150,000 Pageviews and Counting!

 My BirdsEyeViews blog hit a milestone this month (November 2020) when this pageviews counter registered 150,000.  

In April 2017 the 100,000 number was reached and I acknowledged that with this post. I began my blog in May 2010 when I really started to get into bird and nature photography. The first post back then was titled, appropriately, "Time to Blog!"

This post is number 263 in the 10 years since I launched the site. So that averages to just more than a couple dozen posts a year. My output has increased greatly in this bizarre year of 2020. I'm at 34 posts as of this one. In April I began what has turned out to be my longest blog post. This documents Covid-19 with the admittingly corny headline, "Pandemic Pandemonium- Corona Leave Us Alone-a." 

I knew it would be remiss to not document this strange, difficult and for so many people and families tragic world event.  As the months went along from total shutdown locally to South Carolina's comparatively early re-openings I took photos and added to the post until mid-June when things were somewhat back to normal in the Charleston area. Make that the new normal anyway. 

The above image shows my blog posts that have received more than 1,000 pageviews. The topics cover quite a geographic range. My lovely wife Alesia has made most of these trips (the international ones for sure) possible through her work and associated travel mileage and hotel perks. 

Blogger, (also called Blogspot) being a Google product, comes with some interesting statistics such as the above that breaks down the 150,000 pageviews by where they have been seen around the world. The majority, of course, is in the United States but it's surprising to see Russia at No. 2 and China also in the top five, two places I have never visited. Anything nefarious there? I don't know...maybe? 

I try to understand Google analytics and the intricate algorithms that determine how things are searched and found on the internet. My blog does not have a large number of followers, so I cannot attribute the average 15,000 pageviews a year to faithful followers. But I am conscious to always use many embedded links and keywords in the story headlines and lead sentences. I know enough about algorithms to know that these are one of the keys to my posts popping up on peoples' screens as being somewhat related to what they are looking at or for at the time.

As far as comments made to blog posts, I don't get a lot of feedback that way. I have had run-ins with spam comments in an assortment of languages, which I try to immediately delete when I become aware of them. 

However, it is nice and invaluable to see constructive comments time-to-time that a reader takes the time to write. Today while doing some research for this post, I saw a comment had come in that I had yet to approve for posting with the story (that's a good feature!). It has to do with a remote family gravesite in Colleton County at the Donnelley Wildlife Management Area preserve that I, through great effort in the woods, found and have blogged about three times, I think. 

A reader left an anonymous comment that he or she has also been to this Hutchinson family site (shown above) and was able to transcribe a few of the inscriptions that I could not. Click here to see the post and scroll down at the bottom to see that comment and the response I made today. 

I will find time to update this post to highlight the new information provided by "Unkown." I asked if I could get his or name in order to give proper credit. We'll see if this gets a response!  

This is one of the many fun and satisfying parts of blogging!