It seems that only yesterday I was saying thank you to my first 100,000 unique visitors at this blog after just over two years of writing. That was at the start of March. Now, 10 months later, I want to say thank you to more than 208,000 visitors for coming here and reading my humble efforts at writing, at philosophy, politics, history, science, reviews and – very important to me – music.*
In 2014, I wrote 220 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 527 posts. I’ve written almost 840,000 words – more than 350,000 of them in 2014. With more than 99,000 words written on the Municipal Machiavelli, that means I’ve put more than a million words online since I started this. And that doesn’t count the books I wrote, the magazine articles, the draft posts, forum posts, my websites, ukulele reviews, and so on.
Thank you, everyone for taking the time to read it. I am humbled by your visits. I doubled my readership in the past year. Plus I got more than 50,000 unique views on the Municipal Machiavelli. As a writer, that means a lot to me.
Thanks also to those who have commented and shared their opinions. I have always welcomed civil discussion and exchange of ideas. I have only had to block a very few comments over these past three years, and those for immature personal attacks.
I also want to say thanks to the many people who offered me personal wishes on my mother’s health this fall and winter. She managed to reach her 95th birthday this month – we weren’t always sure she would make it – and although not very well, she’s a fighter: she manages to hang on. I went to visit her yesterday and hope to do so again in a few days. I can only hope I have her strength and doggedness to reach that age.
May you all have a happy, prosperous and safe 2015.
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* More than 208,000 different viewers as of today’s count, from 187 countries, although mostly from Canada, USA and the UK. Unique visits count the number of different viewers, not the same people coming back or a tally of the pages they viewed (like many page “hit” counters).
