Beginning a third year

Today represents the beginning of the third year of Rambles - this is post #774 - that represents a bit more than one post per day. We've had just under 9000 hits on the site (or a bit more than 12 per day). Of the posts that have been indexed (this was a service that blogger introduced after the blog had started) there have been 472 cites (in many cases I will post more than one topic in a post). The highest number of references has been in The Political Class (100) and Economics (50) but Mexico, Baseball and a number of other issues (including Philosophy) have had lots of posts.

The most read posts in this blog were about the leadership problems at Gallaudet University. But other popular posts were about Mexico and some of the writing I have done in re-reading some of the classics in economic and literature. Of the comments I have received many have been helpful - only a couple have been hurtful (and those were from a former radio host in the Sacramento area who evidently had too much time on his hands).

Clearly, Rambles, while rating pretty high among local blogs, has not reached national heights in popularity. For the first year I consistently ranked in the Sacramento top 20. (I took their pointer off at the beginning of the second year.) But as Hugh Hewitt pointed out in his book on Blogging (which was part of the inspiration for this project) - even with a small readership there are benefits from doing this on a regular basis.

One of the benefits of this blog has been some contacts around the world. During the 2006 Mexican election, I did a lot of posts on my thoughts on the contest. As a result of those posts, a group who had been active readers of the Post's coverage invited me to join their discussion group. It has turned out to be a series of very interesting exchanges.

One unresolved issue that still puzzles me. The highest hit number on a post is actually not on a Rambles post (although it is linked in several blog indexes). It is a picture I took in Naolinco Mexico of one of their beautiful streets. That picture both on Rambles and on my flickr site has been hit a lot of times. I did not think the picture was that special - but evidently someone did.

Thanks again to all of you who have read and commented on this blog.