The State of the Blog

The first post of the QuadCityImages blog was made on October 12th, 2005. It was around this time that one of the founding fathers of QC-area blogs, The Fly, decided he or she was going to go back to doing a 1-person blog. Colonel Davenport and I were downsized, so I figured I would spin off my own blog. I wouldn't have guessed that I'd still be doing it 400 posts and a year later, but I also don't regret doing it. I've learned a lot of things and met a lot of people who are all interested in making Davenport a greater city than it already is. One benefit of being non-anonymous is the ability to meet people in "real life" instead of just talking to them via email or comments.

I never really had much interest in how many hits I was getting, so I never added a counter to the site. My fairly unprofitable AdSense ads on the right side have a page that keeps track of things, including hits, so that does act as somewhat of a counter. Since adding the AdSense banner, I've had 62,912 hits. That certainly doesn't come out to the 1000+ hit days that Fly used to have when people got really riled up, but I feel that there are enough comments and readers to keep the blog interesting. We've all seen what happens when too many people comment, with the QCTimes' online comments.

I'm proud that you readers seem to provide much more intelligent discussion than the QCTimes and QCOnline commenters. I also do read every comment, so having 4 or 5 30+ comment threads can get kind of time consuming anyway. I'm also proud that I have never deleted a comment due to content, although WindingHills has gotten pretty close. I'm sticking with fully anonymous comments, even though it can be a source of frustration. Its the back and forth between you, the readers that keeps me going on here, and its been great so far.

Thanks for being good blog readers/commenters folks, and hopefully I'll still be around in another year.

QuadCityImages