I started my blog in April 2009 and began with a posting every few days or so but at the beginning of June I read a challenge to write a blog a day for the whole month of July. I was sure that I could do better than that and set out to post a blog a day for a whole year. Yesterday I achieved that objective!
This actually wasn’t as difficult as it first sounds because in between the regular new posts I was able to upload my considerable back catalogue of travel diaries that I began writing on an island hopping holiday to Greece in 2006. These had previously been posted on an AOL blogging site but that was switched off with little warning in 2008 and all of my work went into an internet black hole. Luckily I had copies of them all backed up on Microsoft Word. After AOL I tried Blogger for a while but found it rather clumsy and restrictive and then I discovered WordPress and have used it ever since.
I estimate that during the past year I have written approximately 300,000 words and uploaded something like 750 pictures and at times I have reached back into my memory and retrospectively written diaries going as far back as a holiday to Italy with my dad in 1976. I wish now that I had kept a diary that recorded all of my previous travels.
According to the web tool Flag Counter the top ten countries with hits on my pages are USA, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, France, The Netherlands and Australia although taking population into consideration they are United Kingdom, Greece and The Netherlands. The United Kingdom is obvious I suppose and I can understand Greece being second because there are a lot of posts about the Greek Islands (fifty-eight) but I haven’t written a single sentence about Holland so I think I shall have to put that right.
The most specifically visited page is a blog sticking up for the Airline company Ryanair. I wrote this because I get annoyed reading all of the criticism of Michael O’Leary, which seems to be one of the most popular things to write about on the internet. People must spend hours looking for Ryanair on the net and I suspect that this is one of the most popular searches on Google.
The second most popular is a record of a day out to London in May 2008 to attend a Royal Tea Party at Buckingham Palace. This one becomes especially popular around this time of the year when this season’s invites go out and those who will be attending are trawling the net for tips on what to expect and specifically, it seems, what to wear.
Surprisingly popular are a collection of six little essays about Spain’s national hero, El Cid, and added together these blogs have had more hits than any other single post. One Spanish school child sent me a message to say thank you because he had used it as the basis of a school essay!
After a year of prolific posting I now plan to slow down and return to a more sustainable pace of blogging. This is forced upon me because I don’t have enough new trips to write about, my back catalogue of holiday diaries is almost exhausted and my memory is fading.
In addition to my travel blog I have also been maintaining a second site called Age of Innocence based on my childhood memories and although I have never been so ambitious in terms of output this is building nicely at around 100,000 words based on a posting a week.
Thanks to anyone who has read my ramblings.
Have Bag, Will Travel 