A week ago today was the 3-year anniversary of my first blog post, which had the unimaginative, default title of “Hello World.” The stats section of my blog dashboard says it has been viewed 4 times (though it was likely viewed a few more times solely as part of my blog home page). It was a single line of text and a photograph from a snowshoeing trip.
Today, now 3 years from the start, the blog has had over 40,000 hits and has over 4,500 followers. I’d like to thank all of you that follow, read, and interact with me and my blog. You have made the past three years worth while.
However, the beginning of my blog was pretty bleak. My first post with more than a single line of text is titled It’s About Sharing Art, posted on January 19, 2011. My stats indicate this post has been viewed only 9 times. By the end of January 2011, I had made six posts. None have been “liked” although the post on January 29, 2011, about the death of my friend Bert Daniels, did garner my first comment. In total, the blog received 71 views in the first month of its existence.
Finally, with my second post in February 2011 (and my eighth post overall) I earned a “like.” That post, titled “Fun in the Dark,” was about light painting. The next several months provided gradually more views (192 views in February, 183 in March, 475 in April, 629 in May, 403 in June, and 255 in July), but very few comments and likes (4 likes, 1 comment in March; no likes, 2 comments in April; 1 like, 1 comment in May and the same again in June; 8 likes, 5 comments in July).
At the time, I remember thinking that it may not be worth doing. Views per month had peaked and were starting to fall. August 2011 appeared to be more of the same, with only 364 views. Then I was blessed by the WordPress gods, and my August 30, 2011 post, titled Mountain Blues, was picked as a Freshly Pressed feature. And with that, the number of view in September jumped to over 7,000. Suddenly I was getting lots of likes, many more comments, and a lot of subscribers. Since that time, the number of view my blog gets per month varies, but averages around 1,000. Hopefully those of you that do view my blog get something worthwhile out of it. That is my true goal, to help my readers with their photography.
In celebration of three years of blogging, I am giving away a 10×15-inch signed print of the one of the images below to one lucky person. Leave a comment about indicating which print you would like, and I will pick one person by random drawing for their selected print. The three images are 1) “Gig Harbor’s Mountain” an image I took in 2005 that is still one of the most popular images I’ve taken; 2) “Low Tide, Beach #4” of a tide pool in Olympic National Park, a favorite of mine that won 1st place in the scenic print competition at the 2012 meeting of the Nature Photographers of the Pacific Northwest; it was also the subject of a blog post where I described going from previsualization to the print itself; and 3) “Seattle Moon”, one of my favorite shots from my Scenic Seattle ebook. Good luck and thanks for 3 great years!
