Happy birthday to this blog! Yes indeed, it has been 5 years!
Technically I started this blog on Tumblr and then moved to its current WordPress platform, but it is 5 years old this month! The genesis of the blog was to find a vehicle to keep friends and family apprised of our photos, tales, locations and experiences, and hopefully it has accomplished some of that goal.
The very first post, although moved to its current place on this blog sometime later, was from a paddling trip down the Altamaha River, on the Georgian coast, in March of 2013. This trip was extraordinary, and of course you can read about it here.
Over the life of this blog, we have been from northern Maine to Washington State, to Alaska, to Death Valley, to San Diego, to the Keys, and just about everywhere in between. Our thirst for travel and adventure is only stronger, and strangely our bucket list keeps getting longer!
The underpinnings of this blog are on WordPress. Let me give a quick shout-out to the folks at WordPress! WordPress is a really easy tool for creating a web page, registering a URL, and customizing the site in a variety of ways. And support from WordPress has been fantastic. So if you were contemplating a way to share your story, I would highly recommend these folks.
One of the site features is the “search” field, which I have found to be pretty useful and fairly accurate if I do a search for a particular topic. For example, if you were interested in my first post about the trip on the Altamaha River, you could just type in “Altamaha”. Similarly, you could type in “Halloween”, “Vermont”, “Appalachian Trail”, “zombie” or whatever subjects you are interested in. If it is in the blog, it should appear in one (or more) of the posts served up from your search.
Occasionally (rarely) I have found that some of the links to older posts sometimes gets messed up, but I try to keep even old posts workable. If you find an issue (pictures or text doesn’t show), let me know and I will fix.
Another way to look up things that might be of interest is to use the drop-down categories., like “NH” for New Hampshire, or “1-Food” for posts that mentioned some interesting food or restaurant Or you can click on a particular “tag” if it rings a bell. Or you can just scroll through recent posts.
And lastly you can always search the archives by month and year.
To date, we have seen over 30,000 views and over 11,000 visitors to this blog. Those numbers are literally a rounding error compared to many blogs and social media sites. I know there are ways to increase traffic to this blog, but quite frankly it just hasn’t been a particularly motivating factor for me. If you enjoy it – great! And if you refer the blog to friends and they enjoy it? Even better!
Visitors come back and view most of my nearly 300 posts – every year! Even though this is just March, in the first 3 months of 2018, over 75% (so far) of all my posts, since the creation of this blog, have been viewed. At the end of 2017 it was over 99%, and likewise each year before that.
Now it could be friends, it could be strangers, or hell, it could be Russian trolls looking for content to steer the midterm elections. God help us if this blog is a source of inspiration or content!
I never know who visits my blog, unless of course you self-identify yourself by making a comment or sticking pins in your voodoo doll. It escapes me why you visit this blog – it must be a slow day.
While not sure if this is a badge of honor, shame, or neither, this blog exists without generating a single penny of revenue – no ads, no paid links, no nothing. There is limited real estate on a computer, tablet or phone for sharing photos and tales, so I try to use that space judiciously. I’d love to share with you some of my photos on a huge screen! But by design I have avoided making this blog into a commercial enterprise. Money can change things, and not always positively.
You may be thinking we live an interesting life, and you would be correct. But the reason is because the brains behind our team is my bride; she comes up with all the great ideas, interesting places and planning associated with getting us from Point A to Point B and beyond. If planning was up to me, you might see me posting about sewing a button on one of my shirts instead of posting pictures of bears from 30 feet away.
Hopefully this blog puts a smile on your face, a bee in your bonnet, and warmth in your heart for the photos, tales, places and experiences we have enjoyed. You keep reading, and we’ll keep posting.
Have fun, keep it between the ditches, and never stop learning!