It’s been a day and a half since my first post and I must say that the experience has been anticlimactic. Seventy unique visitors have pointed their browsers at my blog to date. I even had a handful of hits from such places as Canada, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. It was thrilling to call up my AWStat statistics page and see those little colored flags representing seekers of knowledge from distant cultures. Was it my use of the keyword “Taoism” that attracted them?

Hardly. A lonely graphic on that same statistics page has a column for how many readers found my page using keywords. The adjoining column lists those keywords. Both columns were empty.

Another table reveals that several spiders and robots visited my site. But very few people.

The most telling statistic was the table on duration of page views. Yes, I had 70 people visit my website after my first blog post. But 75% of them spent less than thirty seconds viewing it. Only 14% spent between five and fifteen minutes on the site, which I have calculated is the amount of time needed to read to the end. I suppose I should have included more pictures.

Just for fun I typed in the word “Taoism” using the Google Blogs search engine. It was quickly obvious I needed to pick a more obscure term. William Augustus Bowles is my biography subject. I have spent enough time with Bowles to know that he is not a common subject of inquiry. I figured his name might come up in a blog or two occasionally, so I didn’t expect to be near the top of the first page.

Typing his name into Google Blogs yielded fifty results on five pages. There are some interesting results in there to check out later, but my blog doesn’t show up at all. I don’t know much about search engine optimization (SEO) yet, but obviously using an obscure term three or four times in a single post ain’t good enough to get recognized.

The fanfare generated by my first post was not what I had imagined, but I am told by people in a position to know that I did pretty well for a newbie. The most satisfying part was receiving positive feedback. I got three comments on my blog the first day. My first comment was from a complete stranger named Alan who apparently specializes in the sale of faucets for recreational vehicles. Alan, if I can ever afford an RV I will purchase the bathroom fixtures from your website.

My good friend Jan responded with her usual facetiousness that I should blog about stinky cheese. Jan and I share a love for pungent foods. She has been known to sprinkle truffle oil on her Frosted Flakes (something that would make my late cousin W.K. Kellogg snap, crackle and pop in his grave). She gifted me last summer an expensive round of French soft cheese that tasted heavenly but would scare off all but the most brave by its smell. I took the unopened package home and put it in the refrigerator. Then I packed, got up early, and went away for a long weekend.

When I got home I reached for a beer and discovered the frig had been scoured clean in my absence. My roommate, George, a fastidious person, explained that something went rotten and he couldn’t figure out what it was. Apparently he couldn’t sleep the night before because the smell had pursued him into his bedroom. He got up in the middle of the night and threw away an entire week’s worth of pre-cooked food. The smell was so bad, and the source was so elusive, that he was reluctant to even open the containers to sniff for the culprit. His Tupperware went to the curb with the cheese.

I also got a great comment from a high school acquaintance, Cyndy Kalinowski, who lives on a farm in Michigan with her husband and kids, but spends time in Burkina Faso, in Africa, helping to care for “adopted” families less fortunate than hers. She has a very interesting blog of her own which is worth visiting. I’d provide a link if I knew how. Go to the comment on my website and click on her name.

All in all I am pleased with blogging so far. It’s a lot more work than I expected. The writing is easy compared to the housekeeping. We should all do it, if for no other reason than to create a tangible record of our passing.