One year old today

It’s a year today since I launched Homepaddock with a post on Doc Cutting Staff.

Blogging started slowly with just 10 posts from April 22 until the end of the month, climbed to a peak of 390 in October when I was in serious danger of having an unhealthy attachment to my computer. I calmed down after the election and a holiday in Argentina in December when I spent several days at a time without internet access put things back in perspective.

The first comment was made on a post about the farmers’ slice of food  prices on May 15. The first link was made, by The Hive on a post about Phil Goff admitting Labour might lose, five days later. Even though The Hive is no longer live, it’s not unusual to get several visitors a day from there.

Homepaddock entered the Tumeke! rankings  at 115 for May and leapt to 21 in June. It was at 16 the following month and has stayed in the top 20 since then.

Open Parachute’s view isn’t quite so flattering and the Halfdone stats are usually a little more generous.

However, it doesn’t matter which of those you look at, the gap between Kiwiblog  ,which is always number one, and the rest of the New Zealand blogs is huge and one indication of his popularity is the way visitor numbers soar if he links to one of my posts. If blogging was education, he’d be a university professor, those which come next would be close to graduating and I’m still at kindy 🙂

While Kiwiblog links generally result in a surge in visitors, the blog which consistently refers most visitors is No Minister. Most visitors, most days come from there.

Other visitors get directed here after doing searches and some of the terms they use suggest they’ll be disappointed when they find that anything blue is of the political rather than the pornographic kind.

Every now and then I’m asked why I call the blog Homepaddock. The home paddock is the one closest to the house where the pet lambs live and in the days before motor bikes it was the where the farm horses were usually kept. It’s supposed to show I’m on a farm though don’t claim to be a farmer.

Part of the fun of blogging is the feedback, thank you for popping in and thank you especially to those of you who link and leave comments.

What’s in a number?

Monkey with Typewriter is discouraged by a lack of feedback so has written his last post.

I’m sorry because I enjoy his satirical view.

Some of the fun in blogging is the feedback and it’s easy enough to count comments but it’s harder to gauge readership because some people check blogs through RSS readings rather than visits. And while I won’t pretend to understand how Alexa gets its numbers I’ve noticed they don’t seem to have any correlation with the Sitemeter stats.

In spite of a ranking of 12 in Half Done’s February blog ranking,  and a rise of three to 12th in Tumeke’s January ranking ,  Homepaddock is at 23 in Open Parachute’s rating   and I could be upset by the apparent fall or happy to be so high when there’s hundreds of NZ blogs around.

But what stands out for me is not the places but the difference between them. If you look at the gulf between Kiwiblog’s well-deserved grasp on the top spot and compare the numbers of visitors, posts and comments that keep him there with mine I’m just paddling in the shallows.

That doesn’t matter to me. I enjoy the feedback and appreciate comments, I also check visitor stats now and then and like it when they increase but if my blogging depended on numbers of either or both I’d have given up months ago.

UPDATE: MWT fans can relax, the monkey has had second thoughts.