Blog reaches 100,000 hits

The number of hits on the blog passed 100,000 this week. Not many compared to the celebrities and bloggers who seek to maximise clicks but a lot more than I ever expected for what is a diary of events, walks, holidays, places, people and politics. It is over 9 years since I started the blog. The purpose at the time was to post news from home so that our son could see what was happening as he travelled around the world. It was not open to wider circulation but limited to family and most of those posts have been deleted.

It was only after a post on completing the GR20 walk on Corsica that I made the blog available so that friends from around Europe whom we had met on the walk could see photos of the adventure. It began to receive a lot of hits and still remains the second most read post. I then decided to start logging my hill walks on the blog, people often asked me the best routes or the time required to climb the munros. I had already completed 4 rounds of the munros and I was starting a post-retirement round with the intention of finishing all the corbetts as well. I could have a complete record of all the the munros with photographs if I chose to walk on the better days. I had always kept a log of the walks but with five or six notebooks, it was becoming increasingly difficult to sort through them to find things. And the photographs were kept  separately in boxes or albums on the days that I had taken photographs

I began to get some positive feedback but I never intended the blog as a means of entering a dialogue. I became aware that the blog was a good way of capturing and saving memories so that they could be revisited when I was less active. I was getting 300-400 hits a month and the fact that the posts were read by others made me take more care than I would have done in a written log. It also encouraged me to take a camera with me on all walks. Writing a blog was a way of being more organised, it made me search for information about places I had been, read research on other subjects and learn about things that interested me. I began to include some hyperlinks.  They are a more useful reference than bookmarks because they are set in context. I could not always remember why I had saved bookmarks.

In 2011 I was working for a Chief Executive in reshaping an organisation with over 2000 employees. I persuaded him to set up a blog to inform the organisation about progress. It usually fell to me to write the fortnightly blog for him. It was short, just 500 words, and captured the main events of his meetings on behalf of the Council and changes taking place. It was slightly galling that the blog was getting more hits per month than my blog received in a year and I was posting at least twice as often but it was a captive audience. I eventually persuaded him to write it one week and he included in his post that he was getting a new puppy, a Border Terrier. It was a human interest story and went viral.

I came to the conclusion that what really mattered was what I wanted to have a record of and I no longer had any compulsion to try and increase the number of hits. I generally post 4 or 5 times a month and the number of hits has been fairly consistent over the past 4 or 5 years at 1000 to 1200 per month. I use it most days as a reference when I want to remember something, someone or someplace so it works for me. There are now 624 posts published including almost all the munros and about 70% of the corbetts. There are another 30 or so waiting to be posted when I get round to scanning in old photos or finding relevant research. 

I heard recently that Hamish McInnes, the famous climber and doyen of mountain rescue, had been hospitalised after losing his memory. It is heartening that he has recovered by reading the 14 books that he had published by way of restocking his memory. It makes me think that it is a pity the blog does not go back to those crazy days of youth but there again, maybe that would be too much for fading faculties to cope with.

Most posts seem to get 30 to 40 hits over the first month or so and then trickle along. The more specific ones such as the walks usually carry on to the hundreds, particularly the more remote hills such as Monadh Liath Northern Corbetts that rank higher on the search engines because there are few other postings or the most popular climbs such as Inaccessible Pinnacle. The biggest hit has been the Top Forty Munros, based on an article I wrote for The Great Outdoors Magazine. Apart from the walks it's Vienna that is the most read post. It is also consoling that some posts about people that I have known and respected are read regularly, presumably by family members. One post about my primary school teacher was used as the Eulogy at his funeral.

I read a post some years ago by a former colleague in his polymath like blog, The Bookish Explorer. He summarised the benefits of blogging with the critical eye and experience of a social scientist  These are captured below in one of his well crafted and researched pieces.

1. You’ll become a better thinker. Because the process of writing includes recording thoughts on paper, the blogging process makes you question what you thought you knew. You will delve deeper into the matters of your life and the worldview that shapes them. 2. You’ll become a better writer. – once, that is, you start to reread your material or get feedback which shows your text was ambiguous... 3. You’ll live a more intentional life. Once you start writing about your life and the thoughts that shape it, you’ll begin thinking more intentionally about who you are, who you are becoming, and whether you like what you see or not. And that just may be reason enough to get started. 4. You’ll develop an eye for meaningful things. By necessity, blogging requires a filter. It’s simply not possible to write about every event, every thought, and every happening in your life. Instead, blogging is a never-ending process of choosing to articulate the most meaningful events and the most important thoughts. This process of choice helps you develop an eye for meaningful things. 5. It’ll lead to healthier life habits (although my partner doesn’t agree!)!. Blogging requires time, devotion, commitment, and discipline. And just to be clear, those are all good things to embrace –they will help you get the most out of your days and life. 6. You’ll inspire others. Blogging not only changes your life, but it also changes the life of the reader. And because blogs are free for the audience and open to the public, on many levels, it is an act of giving. It is a selfless act of service to invest your time, energy, and worldview into a piece of writing and then offer it free to anybody who wants to read it. Others will find inspiration in your writing... and that’s a wonderful feeling. 7. You’ll become more well-rounded in your mindset. After all, blogging is an exercise in give-and-take. One of the greatest differences between blogging and traditional publishing is the opportunity for readers to offer input. As the blog’s writer, you introduce a topic that you feel is significant and meaningful. You take time to lay out a subject in the minds of your readers and offer your thoughts on the topic. Then, the readers get to respond. And often times, their responses in the comment section challenge us to take a new, fresh look at the very topic we thought was so important in the first place. 8. It’ll serve as a personal journal. It trains our minds to track life and articulate the changes we are experiencing. Your blog becomes a digital record of your life that is saved “in the cloud.” As a result, it can never be lost, stolen, or destroyed in a fire. 9. You’ll become more confident. Blogging will help you discover more confidence in your life. You will quickly realize that you do live an important life with a unique view and have something to offer others. The sharpened critical faculty regular blogging also brings to the reading of what others write. Henry James was spot on when he (apparently) said - “How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" You thought you knew something but, when you read back your own first effort at explanation, you immediately have questions– both of substance and style. But this also conveys itself very quickly to changes in the way that you read other people's material – you learn more and faster from a critical dialogue (even with yourself) than from passive reading. It is a fairly comprehensive set of reasons and not all of these will be applicable to most bloggers,  but it provides some cogent arguments to justify the time that blogging entails and sure beats trawling through a lot of dross on social media.