Due to the approach of this milestone, I have spent time this week thinking about blogging. Starting a blog was something that I have toyed with doing for several years. After finally getting the courage up to start, I have been so surprised by how much I enjoy it.

And that specifically is what I have been thinking about this week – why do I enjoy it so much?

I am – and have always been – more of a listener than a talker. I do not like being the center of attention. If in a group of friends, I am much more apt to encourage others to talk and share their problems,then to share my own. My family and my very close friends are accustomed to having to force me to talk.

I think because of this, there are times that I do not feel like I am ever heard.

That doesn’t seem very fair does it? I encourage others to talk as opposed to talking myself, yet sometimes I feel hurt when others don’t make the effort to encourage me to share. Something I need to work on, I guess.

I think that is the answer to why I have so enjoyed blogging, though. I am heard.

The incredible unexpected part of this has been your encouragement and kindnesses. As I have mentioned in other posts, I am so grateful for the amazing comments that you all have left for me. Through them, I feel that I have strengthened relationships with friends and family, and also found new friends.

On a lighter note, I thought it would be fun to share with you some of the random facts about this blog. For those of you that do not know, the host site (WordPress) tallies the views on the site, including for each post. It also keeps track of the referring engine (in other words, whether your viewers came from facebook or somewhere else – and if it was done pursuant to an internet search, it tells you what the search terms were). It does NOT identify the viewers beyond that (so I do not know who specifically has visited, except through comments left).

Since the start of my blog, I have had 12,167 views. Almost half of these views were received on the weekend that WordPress published my post on Freshly Pressed. I still receive traffic off of Freshly Pressed.

My two most popular posts are Fortytude and Feelings of (Blog) Inadequacy.

My personal favorite posts are the ones dealing with my family: My May-December Romance, A Celebration of the Mothers in my Life, In Anticipation of Father’s Day, and My Big Brother. In terms of humorous posts, I like My Beef with Bikram and Why Am I Never Happy with My Hair.

In several of my posts, I have referred to other blogs. Through the statistics maintained by WordPress, I can see that the most frequent blog visited from my site is Peanut Butter Runner. I am proud of this; Jen has an incredibly informative and impressive site that I follow regularly.

The most interesting of the information maintained is the search engine terms. For example, this week, people performing the following searches came up with (and visited) my site: “leanne asheville cheating on husband,” and “beating up my older brother reversal.”  Going further back in the history, other random search engine terms used were: “jon bon jovi brings pizza to fan on oprah,” “helmet on backwards triathlon,” and “porky’s girlfriend.”

I can only hope that my next fifty posts will be as fun for me and that we will continue to connect.

THANK YOU for listening.