MILESTONES

I started blogging regularly on June 1, 2009, although the blog was officially launched two years earlier.  Recently retired and desperate to find some way to keep myself busy, I took my son Patrick’s advice and began writing The Philosopher’s Stone.   At first, so few people visited the site that I could significantly up the number of page views just by checking it several times a day, but once I started serializing my autobiography, word got out that I was an inveterate gossip and things picked up.  As the years passed, the numerical counter offered by Google as one of their add-ons ticked over steadily, until on April 28^th, 2014, almost five years later, I recorded my one millionth page view.  The site has gathered a sizable coterie of readers, some of whom comment with regularity.  I have been delighted and rather astonished to discover that I have readers on all of the populated continents.  Indeed, I even once had a troll, although with a little guidance from readers more adept at these matters than I, I managed to discourage him or her.

Some time tomorrow, twenty-five more months further on, the Google Counter will record the two millionth page view.  Over these seven years, I have put up more than 2700 posts, which works out to more than one a day, and the community of readers have made almost four times as many comments.  And all of this with no term papers to read!  No teacher could ask for more.

During the seven years, I have grown seven years older, as have all of you.  If I keep at it, in another seven years I shall be eighty nine, and there is no telling how many page views this site will have drawn [always assuming that blogging still exists seven years from now and has not been superseded by some even less natural form of communication.]

Thank you all for nodding in.