300,000

I just noticed that I passed a pretty big milestone yesterday. As you can see from the image to the left, I recently passed 300,000 hits on this blog. This means that according to Statcounter, pages on this blog have been loaded 300,000 times, and it does not necessarily mean that 300,000 people have read my blog (olaha mohon na taiguihi).

What's weird is that if I follow the internal counter that Blogger uses, then I've had 300,000 hits for quite a while, since Blogger's counter always counts twice as much as Statcounter. Needless to say, this is an exciting day for me and my blog. I started this blog in August 2004, and this post is my 1,431th. I meant to commemorate the 7th year of this blog last month, lao maleffa yu'.

In 2004, my blog posts were brutally short. Sometimes one or two sentences, sometimes a paragraph. Sometimes I would post several tiny posts in a day. Although I only had this blog for 4 months in 2004, I still posted 120 times, meaning at least once per day.

In 2005, I kept up a high level of posting, with 236 spread across the year. Despite this amount of posts, there still wasn't much traffic coming to my blog. Despite so many posts, I only had 11,000 hits for the entire year. That averages out to less than 1,000 per month. Looking back it is kind of sad. I was putting alot of energy into my blog, but there just wasn't many people clicking on it.

In 2006, I dropped in terms of posts. The pressures of writing and researching a masters thesis at UCSD must have got to me and so I only posted 186 times that year. While my output decreased, I should note that my posts started to get long and longer at this point, as my blog become a place for me to vent and meditate on the stuff I was learning in graduate school. My hits for the year more than doubled, and my blog was visited more than 23,000 times.

In 2007, I feel my writing on my blog really began to mature. By this time I had been organizing with Chamorros in the states for quite a while and also felt comfortable in terms of expressing theoretical ideas and philosophy. Some of my favorite articles from this blog come from that year. There were alot of changes happening in my life this year. I became a father, a started a new relationship in San Diego. I wrote 174 posts, and the amount of hits for the year was more than 30,000.

2008 was the ultimate year for me in terms of blogging. Not only did I write more posts than any other year (241) but my blog was clicked on more than any other year (71,000). The reason for the numerous points was of course the 2008 US Presidential election, where I followed closely the primary races, often commenting on issues of race and gender as Hillary and Obama battled it out for the nomination. I traveled to Denver, Colorado to attend the Democratic National Convention as the official blogger from Guam and wrote several dozen posts on what was happening there. My blog was listed on more blogs than ever around the US, when they released the list of bloggers invited to the convention, and as a result my Google and Technorati rankings shot up. I got more traffic than ever.

In 2009, I dropped off in terms of posting, going from 241 - 155, primarily because this was my last year of dissertation writing, and I found myself spending all of my time working on it. I had no where near as many hits this year as the year before, but it was still my second highest at the time: 57,000.

In 2010, I increased the amount of posts again to 191. Although I did not post as much as I did in my early years, the high number of posts is because of three things: 1) The military buildup. At the beginning of the year, during the heated DEIS period on Guam, I find myself writing about it all the time. Eventually I'll transform my blog posts into an article on what happened to Guam at that time. 2) I traveled to South Korea for a research trip, and wrote many posts on my thoughts and experiences there. 3) I traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan for the 2010 World Conference Against A & H Bombs. I wrote plenty of posts for that trip as well. Perhaps because of peoples' interest in my trips and the buildup my number of hits went up again, this time to 63,000. I would have had many many more posts for this year but I taught 5 classes in the spring and than 6 classes in the fall, in addition to 2 in the summer and 2 in the winter. So in general I was very very busy.

For 2011, I look on target to finish with between 50,000-60,000 hits for the year and somewhere around 160 posts. The amount of writing I do on this blog has taken a hit as other projects, most notably my weekly column in the Marianas Variety that I started last year, take up my time for research, writing and thinking. I need to refocus on writing for this blog. It has been around for a while, it has been an important resource for some, and an important place for me to share my thoughts and work out some ideas as well.

It took me 7 years to get to 300,000, I hope it doesn't take me another 7 years to get to 600,000.

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