Happy anniversary to me!

Yesterday WordPress sent me a notification that it was my 6 year blogging anniversary.  Six years. Wow! Who’d a thunk?  I never imagined when I made my tentative start that six years later I would still be blogging and still loving it.  Heck, I didn’t even realize I’d have to have a blog name when I reached the end of the signing up process!

I had no idea that I would meet a number of fellow bloggers in person in places like San Francisco, Kansas City, Branson (Missouri), Philadelphia, Chicago, and even France in places like China Town, homes, writer’s conferences, coffee shops, libraries, and aboard a barge on a French river in full spate, or that I’d be chatting with people from all over the world.  What fun!  One of my goals is to meet many more of you in person.

And the winner is…someone completely unexpected!

Towards the end of January 2016, I’ll have blogged daily, sometimes more than once, for four years.  Hard to believe.  While I started out with only writing, sometimes with photos borrowed (with attribution or permission) from the internet, my blogs moved now to mostly photos.  I’m trying to bring back more of a balance, but we’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, it’s interested me to see which posts are the most popular, so I waded through the stats pages to find the following.

The most viewed in one day post, as I linked it to something on FB, was a grammar post I titled “The drop of an “at.” When I saw it had garnered 473 views, pushing my total for that day to 598, I couldn’t believe it.  Unfortunately, most of the viewers didn’t bother to “like” or comment, but it still made me feel good.  Total views of that post have been 823.

My most liked post was a Weekly Photo Challenge shot, “Depth…water droplet.  This has been viewed 384 times and reached 254 likes.  Will I ever be able to top that?  I don’t know, but I’ll keep trying.

But sometimes a post takes on a life of its own.  My post with the most staying power and overall views, is one I did back on December 9, 2012: Story of Stalin’s war…Al Stewart’s Roads to Moscow.  I didn’t have many followers then and the original post only got 16 likes and 4 comments, two of which were probably mine.  But with a persistence which continually surprises me, this post has been viewed 1,595 times!!  Rarely a day goes by without a view (no likes or comments) and I just shake my head and smile.  Who’s viewing this and why don’t they respond?  Is it linked somewhere obscure, somewhere that people find and then come to my post.  I Googled “Al Stewart’s Road’s to Moscow” and didn’t find it.  But when I put in “Stalin’s War, Al Stewart”, my link came up first!  🙂

Thanks for “listening” to my ramblings and for being a follower of my blog…or at least a reader.  I love meeting and talking with people from all over the world via my blog (and theirs) and even meeting some of them.  I also love finding out what you’re doing and thinking via your blogs, although I can’t begin to regularly get to as many as I’d like and still have any sort of non-computer life.

Speaking of non-computer life, I’m out of here and into the real world.  🙂  See you soon!  If you go over to view the Story of Stalin’s War, “like” (if you do) and comment.  It will change everything.  And do take time to listen to the song.  It’s wonderfully sad.

Story of Stalin’s war…Al Stewart’s Roads to Moscow

History has always fascinated me, but it’s most interesting when you learn the stories of the people who lived it.  I love learning history from good historical fiction (or well-written non-fiction), but history in a song has its own special place.

I’ve always liked Al Stewart’s Roads to Moscow for its minor tunes but didn’t always give my full attention to the lyrics.  Then one day elsewhere, I read that Russian soldiers who were captured, even briefly, by the Germans, were suspected of having been turned and of now being spies.  They were given short shrift if they lived to return to Russia–either killed or sent off to Siberia. Hence this song, when I began really listening, took on new, heartrending meaning.