Welcome to My 100th Posting!!

Can you believe it? This is my 100th blog posting to Waving Not Drowning. Yes, 100 rants, raves, reviews and ramblings have passed before your eyes – and it is only mid-February! As my faithful reader will know, I started this little enterprise at the tail end of August last year. I had a vague notion at the time of joining in the global conversation and, if I had been tortured way back then, would have confessed that I suspected I’d have got it all off my chest by now and would be on to other things. So, for those of you who are mildly interested and have nothing better to do, here’s my state of the blog report for this rather odd milestone.

• I’m averaging a little better than one posting every two days and have been since the beginning.
• Almost 2,000 pages have been served in the past 5 months and the average number of pages served per month has gone up from 202 in September to 578 last month.
• Similarly, the number of pages served per day (my daily readership, if you like) has risen from 7 in September to 21 this month. If it keeps tripling every five months, I’ll need more fingers to do the sums on.
• Advertising income from those fascinating Google ads you all keep forgetting to click on peaked in December at about US$30 for the month and slumped in January to about US$15. Why there is not a linear relationship between ad revenue and pages served may forever be a mystery. Whatever is going on, I’m going to need about ten thousand times more readers before I get rich from this. So please mention me to your ten thousand closest friends.
• The content is still all over the place. I had expected that I would start focusing in on a single topic by now but I see no sign of it. The stupidity of governments, the evils of capitalism, the insanities of religion, my own, continuing lack of broadband – along with a few random rants, raves, reviews and jokes – seem to be evenly distributed among the 100. Still, it’s early days.
• And as for the global conversation, I’m still getting very few comments and almost all of those are from people I know. Even ‘xman’ whom I thought was a stranger, turned out to be a long-lost chum. And Technorati tells me that only two other blogs have linked to mine. Still, even two is quite good in my view – I’d have been happy with one.

But I’m still having lots of fun doing this. As well as satisfying my craving to write, I keep finding fun things to do with the blog itself – like adding those ‘Mark This Site’ buttons last month, or ‘branding’ the blog with the waving hand picture (my own arm, by the way) and my very own tag-line: ‘The blog about everything’. Talk about making a virtue out of a vice! And of course, this month I added my very own book shop. How cool is that? (Alright, so I’m easily amused. Would you rather I was out killing animals for fun – or ‘fishing’ as they call it?)

All in all, I think I’ll keep at it for a while longer.