A HOLIDAY MESSAGE TO YOU
Happy holidays to my followers! In this holiday season, don’t forget to hug those you love and to tell them how important they are to you. It could be your last Festivus, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, or whatever you celebrate, together. Resolve issues, forgive, make peace. Life is short, it goes fast, and tomorrow is not guaranteed.
I intend to be back next year with new materials and photographs!
If you want a summary of my blogging statistics for 2023, keep reading below.
A 2023 BLOG SUMMARY
In 2023, I wrote 56 posts, totaling 24.7K words, which resulted in 6,227 views (down from 7,500 views last year) and short of 800 comments (down from 1K last year). I have short of 260 followers (a little up from 200 followers last year, counting e-mail followers). I suppose half of the comments are my own replies, so my posts received short of 400 comments.
Below is a graph with my blog statistics for 2021-2023. The summary below the bar graph is for 2023 (views, visitors, likes and comments).
My most important referrer is WordPress.com feed, followed by Facebook (I publish my posts there), and search engines. Apparently, and consistent with last year, trying to announce blog posts on Instagram is not worth my time, since only nine views came from there.
Although the number of views of my posts has declined, the number of unique visitors has remained steady in the last three years. A view is counted when a visitor loads or reloads a page. A visitor is counted when WordPress sees a user or browser for the first time in a given period (day, week, month). So if you only have one visitor and 42 views, it means that one person has 42 read different posts, or reloaded a page 42 different times.
It is disappointing, although not life-threatening, to look at my graph for the last three years and notice that the blog was the most popular in 2021, when I created it. I had fewer followers, but more views. I do not know the reasons for this, but it is possible that people were more curious in the beginning, some followers have lost interest, and my posts are not relevant enough or key-worded in such a way that they will be found by search engines in the first page. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that my posts with the fewest numbers of views in 2023 are those from my first year of blogging.
My three most popular posts, in this order, were as follows:
• The most delicate flower grows amongst the sharpest spines – Echinopsis chiloensis, a Chilean cactus; (137 views)
• Photographing the Foxtail Agave, chapter two: inspiration in The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius; (129 views)
- What does photography mean to you? (127 views)
As in 2023, people rarely clicked on links provided in my posts. This includes links with supporting information, for example to Wikipedia or other informative sites, or links to YouTube videos and to my previous posts. This again makes me wonder about the usefulness of providing links, but I am not going to stop including them when they contain information, I am not willing to repeat. They certainly do not hurt.
I realize that my statistics are not impressive, and are not getting much better. Despite that, I am still a happy blogger, and I owe all my blogging happiness to my loyal followers.
Thanks so much for following me through 2023, and for the kind support and feedback you have given me. More importantly, I am grateful that I have found several interesting blogs to follow on a variety of subjects, and for the chance to participate in discussions on various issues that include, but are not limited to, photography.
THE LEAD PHOTOGRAPH
The featured photograph, repeated below for convenience, is from the Great Dickens Christmas Fair 2023, at the entrance, where staff where Christmas Caroling to welcome us. This fair has become a tradition for my son and I, and we have gone every year for the last five when it happened.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Wall Art landscapes and miscellaneous
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It is all about the light 
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