Milestone Reached—A Million Hits On the Old Man’s Ramblings

My Celebratory Facebook meme.

Sometime after 2 pm CST yesterday this blog got its one millionth hit since migrating to Blogger in July 2011 as noted by super fan Richard Piszczek who has been breathlessly tracking the approach to the milestone for months.  The exact millionth customer slipped by the register of my little pop stand at the dead end of the cul-de-sac unnoticed and thus missed the balloons, confetti, Dixieland band, and valuable cash prizes.

Of course in the world of internet media taking six and a half years to register that number makes this offering small potatoes indeed.  But it impresses the hell out of me.  Allow me a moment to gloat.

Of course, there are caveats to the statistic.  It includes a bunch of my own clicks while searching the blog.  And Blogger’s statistical analysis shows tens of thousands of hits from Russia, Ukraine, China, India—99% of which are web crawling bots.   Also, research shows that page hits do not translate to readers.  Most linger for a few seconds to scan the headline and maybe first paragraph.  Only about 10% of visitors read any or all of a post.

The Old Man and Chief Bloviator on the job scouting a story.

But like any other self-promoter I’ll whistle past that grave yard and hype the eye-popping but deceptive stat.

I can also take comfort that the total does not include the blog’s early incarnation over on LiveJournal 12 years ago on January 17, 2006.  Of course in the earliest days I would be fortunate to get a dozen hits a week.  And LiveJournal turned out to be a platform rushing to oblivion, especially after it was bought by Russians and moved its servers to Moscow. Which is why I moved to Blogger.  I probably had 100,000 or so collective hits on the old site.  And thanks to Google searches some of the old posts still get hits.

I started out thinking I might become an internet sensation and go-to pundit.  Those were the early glory days of blogging and anything seemed possible.  More obscure writers than even me were becoming electronic celebrities overnight.  Me, not so much.

A screen shot of the first Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout blog entry on LiveJournal

The blog has evolved and changed focus several time over all those years.  Once or twice it nearly petered out.  But I have soldiered on and today present a mixture of posts heavy on history, with some poetry, memoirs, and political rants thrown in for variety.

I hope to keep at it for a while yet.  I may be old, but ain’t dead.  And since I am retiring from the day job in a couple of month, I am thinking of putting together an anthology of some of the most interesting or entertaining posts. We’ll see.

But for now, thanks for kindly droppin’ by and all come back now, ya hear!