Sunday, May 11, 2008

Four things

1. Dear God but my blog stats are in free fall right now. I know this happens every year around this time, but it's always disheartening to see 250 unique visitors a day plummet to below 150, which is about where I am right now. The one thing that keeps me doing the blog is that a lot of people probably just subscribe to the blog using a feed of some kind. However, I have no way of tracking that. Does anyone have a feed tracker that would keep track of everyone subscribing here? I realize in the long run it probably doesn't matter, but I do like keep tracking of how many people visit the blog. Because really, those numbers help give me the boost on days where I really can't be bothered.

2. I've just acquired Scarlett Johansson's album of Tom Waits covers. Anyone care to lay wagers on how badly this album is going to suck?

3. Starting to put together a list of songs for the third anniversary CD. If you have any suggestions, feel free to pay them along. Although once again this year, we won't be together on our anniversary. I head back to Iqaluit on July 20 and she heads back to Newfoundland. Which kind of sucks. But next year that will change as we plan on being in Australia.

4. Finally saw "There will be blood last night", meaning I've now seen all the finalist for the best movie of the year for the Oscars. Ummmm....they were kind of a lacklustre bunch. "Juno" and "Michael Clayton" were all right. "Atonement" was blah and "No Country for Old Men was horrifically overrated. And aside from the amusement of watching Daniel Day Lewis (the "I drink your milkshake" is classic, I have to admit), it was kind of a blah film as well. Aside from "Juno", I don't really see a potential classic in the bunch.

And that's all from the Chateau from now. Something interesting tomorrow, I hope...

3 comments:

Megan said...

You can track all of your subscribers with Feedburner. It's great.

Peter L. Whittle said...

Craig:

I guess I never pop up as a unique visitor but I do drop in every day to look around.

Your a former Newspaper Reporter who used to have your articles your name published in papers with a distribution in the thousands.

Blogging to smaller numbers must at times must be a challenge. I sometimes think for exposure I would be much better of writing a stream of letters to the Telegram or jumping on open-line shows. However, exposure was not the reason for the blog.

I blog because it is a great place to express my opinions, or share a story. I like the idea of offering an "As it Happens Style" with a mixture of current events, life stories and a splatter of politics. If I influence someone to think about an issue great, if not, well I tried.

For example a few weeks ago I judged a speak-off in the Goulds and one of the contestants quotes my blog. I was like, okay someone reads this.

How important are numbers to keeping up a personal blog? I have to confess that I do not obsess over it but I do have a counter and get a great deal of satisfaction when I get lots of hits and feel and a little down when less than 400 people visit.

All I know for sure is that I read your blog for a long time before taking the time to do one of my own and I will continue to drop in.

Keep it up. Lots of folks like reading your thoughts.

Mungo said...

Hello,
I just came across your blog from http://kiggavik.typepad.com/. Great reading!

re: Tracking feed readers - I also use Feedburner - very accurate, and they were recently purchased by Google, so they have some very good analytics behind them. Make sure that you redirect your atom feed to the Feedburner.com one... the site will explain it.

Cheers,

Mungo