A message to my readers

I started this blog in 2006, not expecting to make a post a day, but probably one or two a week, but in those days there was no statistics report available, and after a few months I was disappointed at the lack of feedback. For about a year I posted nothing at all, because it was hard to sustain my interest in writing when I wasn't sure anyone was reading what I wrote. I eventually came back to the blog, and actually did more posting than my original one or two a week in the period leading up to the 2008 election (if you look at the log you'll see this), but I never was sure anyone read what I wrote except that one of my posts in March 2008, on, of all things, election methods (a pretty esoteric topic!) got more feedback than anything else. But you'd think that the other posts would have gotten more attention, and I continued to be frustrated at the lack of evidence that anyone was reading this blog. Still, I kept posting, sometimes going a few weeks without a post and sometimes posting more than once in a week. Finally, a couple of months ago, Google introduced stats. I could finally tell I was getting an audience, at least it looked like about 3 people a day (which — then — seemed like a lot!) So I felt more encouraged to post, and I did more. And the audience got bigger — to 8 a day and 10. It was obvious that what I'd read — that you need to post frequently — was true. Lately I've been posting nearly every day, and averaged 50 hits a day in September. Of course, part of that was that just before the primaries I had days with immense numbers of hits, which was in itself a big surprise because I was mostly talking about really local issues, of interest to Marylanders only, or even only to people in Montgomery County! But in the process I picked up some fans — I must thank Neil Cohen for featuring a link to my blog on his campaign pages, which has sent quite a lot of people here, and Dennis Sanders' "Big Tent Revue" which has also been a source for some visitors here.

Currently I'm averaging as many people as I did in September, even though September's average was inflated by those days just before the primary and if those days had been ignored my month average would have been much lower. So I want to thank all of you who have discovered this blog and, obviously, are coming back frequently. It would have been nice to get this traffic before, but I hope I'll be able to hold your interest.