10,000 page visits! (flash post)

To all my readers, I want to say thanks for visiting and reading my blog! You've come over often enough to push the all-time pageview count to 10,026 this evening. It's rewarding for me to pull thoughts and experience together into a post using words and photos. And it's particularly rewarding to know that people in a number of countries are reading.

To give you an idea of the readership, here's a screenshot of my blog statistics page. This table shows the top ten countries in pageviews since I started the blog in the fall of 2010. The figures for the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, and Canada correspond to places where I know I have regular readers. The others on this top ten list may or may not represent actual readers (they could be web-crawling robots, for example). I know I have readers in Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore and other countries beyond this list. As always, I'd love to hear from readers who have found me from other countries, too. Drop me a comment on the blog or send an email to chapterthis@umich.edu.

Coming up on 10,000 visits (flash post)

Since I began the blog Chapter This, the blogspot tracking feature (a google service) has measured more than 9,800 page visits. That means if you come and read the latest entry and then look at a slide show or visit older posts, each one of those is counted as a page visit. In the last month, traffic was 1,100 page visits, which includes the post Anniversary approaching, the most popular post to date. At this rate, 10,000 visits is not too far away. For me and my four-year-old blog, that's a solid number.

What do I know about the readers of Chapter This? I have four email subscribers (see the left side bar to sign up--this is a painless way to receive an email that includes all texts and images of new posts). Another bunch of people seem to head to my blog when I announce a new post on facebook. Otherwise, I know only that most readers are in the USA, followed by Germany. After that, Russia in the lead. Are you a reader in Russia? I'm curious to know. I think my Russian readership is actually robots and search engines that slip under the google radar. Perhaps the same is true for other countries (Ukraine, Poland, China, Turkey?), or perhaps I have reached readers I don't know about.

In any case, if you are a real peson reading my words and enjoying my photos, I'm glad you are there! I will continue to observe, sense and feel the world around me, and I will write my impressions here. I love hearing from readers. I understand the comment feature is not terribly user-friendly. To avoid spam, I moderate the comments and post them as soon as I see them. You can also reach me via email at <chapterthis.umich.edu>.

Come on 10,000! Have you missed some posts? Use the left side bar to find the full history, the most popular posts, and labels that take you to varous topics (e.g., "poetry" and "grief"). I update Slide Shows, Language and Such, and Currently Reading sporadically--see the left side bar for the newest dates.

Thank you for reading!