Some time late last night, this blog went over

500,000 Views!

Well cool.

 We went over 500,000 views today.  You probably noticed the raucous celebrations.

In context, this doesn't actually mean all that much.  For one thing, readership here is declining.

This blog has been around since May, 2009,  although in 09, we posted only 16 times, not very much, that first year.    Readership eventually hit the point where there were about 3,000 to 4,000 views per month, which we frankly thought pretty decent.  It stayed read at that rate for a really long time, but then March 2015 hit and we began to post a lot, indeed in daily, century delayed, real time, on the Punitive Expedition, which has always been a major focus of the blog.  While we were doing that we discovered Reddit's 100 Year Ago subreddit and started posting some items, well. . . quite a few items, that were going up here daily over on that site.  Not all of these were on the Punitive Expedition by any means, many were just things 100 years old, which served in our mind to set the background to our Punitive Expedition focus.

Just posting on the Punitive Expedition alone jumped readership here appreciably. Daily hits went from 3,000, to 4,000 per month up to about a consistent 4,000 to 5,000.  And when things began to be cross posted on Reddit readership shot up. Things peaked in March of this year with the monthly total, that month, being 56,000 views.

But we stopped the daily entries right about then as well, as the US withdrew from Mexico in February 1917.  Some thing trailed on of course, which is why we peaked in March.  And since we stopped, readership has really really dropped off.  It declined steadily and fell to 10,000 views in June of this year, and then climbed back up to 15,000 for August, but has since steadily declined again.  Last month we were down to 12,000 views.  As of this post, for this month, we're at 8,541 and I doubt we'll make 12,000. I can't even tell if we're going to stabilize at the 10,000 mark or go lower.  Most days right now we tend to get between 200 and 250 views, it seems to me.  Some days are a lot more, one day last week we shot back up to over 2,000 in a single day, but many are much less, down around 150.

Oh well, the blog isn't a popularity contest.  I would welcome more comments however.

Oddly, I will note, things have really changed the past few months on where people come from who view this blog.  Originally it was almost exclusively from the United States. I'd have thought that I'd get Canadian viewers a fair amount, but I haven't until very recently (I am now).  Indeed, in the English speaking world, the only nation that shows up with appreciable daily views (save for Canada, which now appears in the stats almost daily), and only on odd occasion, is Australia.  But we get a lot of foreign views.  For a long time the second place position went to Russia, but earlier this year we got a lot of daily views from France.  Some days we had more French viewers than America ones.  Recently we've been getting a lot of hits from Italy.  I have no idea why this is true.  When we started posting on the Vietnam War, not surprisingly, we started to get a few daily hits from Vietnam. At least that make sense.

Supposedly now that we've hit 500,000 views, according to some, things change somehow with search engines so we should show up more on searches.  Maybe, maybe not.  It doesn't really matter that much.  Indeed, I sometimes think that I ought to stop blogging entirely, which I've done from time to time in the past.  This blog is in fact the third version of what it is, although the first two started off sort of like what this one has evolved into. This was a pure specialty blog with very limited focus at first.  Anyhow, on that, if I"d kept those blogs up, rather than kill them off when I stopped blogging, this one would have passed 500,000 views sometime ago.  Beyond, that, and to the point of this paragraph, if I don't determine to simply quit blogging, which I likely will not do, I also ponder backing this one down much more to its original focus, in which case I'd certainly blog a lot less.

But then, I seem to have a compulsion to write.  Nearly ever entry here his written with a lot less effort than it might seem, and takes up a lot less time than you might suppose. There's something about writing.  I've always done it.  And I likely always will.

Thanks for reading!