Seven Year Itch

Reading the title of this post you could be thinking that I am writing about the bites that seem to plague me every year at this time. I need to spray myself liberally every time I venture out of the house and woe betide me if I forget just because I am popping into the greenhouse. Itchy as I feel this isn't the subject of my post.

Today it is seven years since I published the very first post on this blog. In those seven years things have changed a lot for both me personally and my blog. Don't bother checking back posts from 2006 as I can guarantee you will be bored, bored and bored! My blog had a whole different purpose and personality back then - in fact it didn't have a personality at all. It had a job to do and it did it. The posts were almost one liners and served as a message board for the plotters on our site. For this reason I started my website as a personal diary rather than an allotment site bulletin board which was more or less where my blog fitted in and although I wrote the blog it wasn't really mine in the true sense.

Gradually the blog evolved - the main change being in 2009 when the blog and the allotment site association parted company. The 'history' behind how my blog grew is posted about here just in case you are interested in that sort of thing. 

At this point the new focus of the blog was to provide information about the manure contamination that was spreading across the country but gradually posts became longer and included life outside of the allotment plot and the blog metamorphosed to become what it is today.

I started my blog thinking I was communicating with a few people on our allotment site and now I am constantly amazed at how far the blogosphere reaches. Initially visitors comments were restricted to banter between plot holders and then gradually I began to gather a group of regular commenters from further afield which I am happy to say are being regularly added to. I still am just as interested in the comments about my posts as I was in those earlier days. 

Initially I tended to 'live' in isolation rarely venturing outside of my own blog area but now I enjoy reading many other blogs as much writing my own. Many of the blogs I enjoy are featured in my bloglists but more are in my pending tray with new ones being added regularly. Some will become firm favourites and others may fade away. Just as in 'real life' we find we have more interests in common with some than with others.

Last week I checked the data from my Clustermap widget. 

First there is information about UK visitor numbers per area. If you click you can read the information. It seems the highest number of UK visitors come from London. Although there were 1,360 visitors from an unknown location.

As far as non-UK visitors the highest number come from the USA.

What I find amazing though is the number of countries that my blog has reached out to. Granted quite a lot of visitors will have just paid a fleeting visit having arrived 'by accident' but a percentage will be visitors with some sort of interest in what I have written. I think it demonstrates the power of the internet as a communication tool. Like all communication tools, though it can be used for bad as well as good reasons.

If you are a visitor that comes regularly on purpose then thank you for your interest and encouragement. If you are a new visitor please don't be reluctant to join in by making comments. New commenters are very welcome. Often it is using the links left by new visitors that I find new blogs to read. (Less welcome are the spammers so please don't follow any links that they leave behind. Many spam comments are filtered out anyway so in most cases they are just wasting their time).  If you are a regular visitor but still are more comfortable just reading then thank you too for taking an interest. 

As for the seven year itch - let's hope we survive it. I think for me the secret has been not to allow the blog to become a job of work or a chore. I don't write about everything we do in the garden, I write about the things that are interesting me at the time. If you also follow Martyn's blog you will have found that although we are writing about the same garden and plot we often write about very different aspects of our gardening activities.

Our website tends to be the diary and record keeping device that we can look back over and compare the current year to previous years and my blog is more snapshots of activities and events. Maybe that will change over time but for now it's how I like it.

As for the other itches I'd better go find that spray before I go out! See you later - I hope

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett