Third blog anniversary

This blog began with an initial post on December 8, 2010. There was no significance to the date, it just happened to be the day I decided to go ahead. A year later, to my considerable surprise, there had been a lot of posts written by me (126) and an astonishing number of page views (51,000). I commented on these numbers on the first anniversary in 2011; you can read about it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/12/one-year-and-counting.html .
     A year later, on the second anniversary in 2012, the total number of posts for the year was similar to the total for the first year, but the page views had jumped even farther, to almost 150,000 total, or nearly 100,000 in the second year alone. Again, I wrote a post about all that, which is at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-second-anniversary.html .
     Now after a third year, the numbers continue to grow, again adding about 125 posts in the course of a year, or around ten a month, and again a big increase in page views, now close to 300,000 views, which means 150,000 in the past year alone, equal to the sum of both of the first two years. I continue to be entirely amazed by these numbers, far beyond anything I had ever imagined.
     Something I had noticed on the second anniversary is continuing to happen, that instead of comments posted to the blog site, most questions are directed to me personally via email. Often these are clarifications or corrections, and many are clearly connections to subjects beyond the post in question, a healthy kind of response. A few are what the questioner thought might be a “dumb question,” which the questioners seem to have thought not to be a good thing to display in public.  As a retired teacher, I subscribe to the old adage that there are no dumb questions, except possibly the ones you fail to ask. But I appreciate them all.
     Another thing I had noticed a year ago continues as a considerable part of the total page views. This is the readers coming to the particular post from search engines. This means the blog is functioning as an archival resource, which I had not really thought about. In fact, in some cases, it functions much like a FAQ (frequently asked questions), since people get referred to certain posts by others who already know of them.
     I continue to enjoy the writing and photography for the blog, something I was not sure would be true. But to date anyway, I am far from tired of it, and very much look forward to continuing.
     Between the (to me) huge number of page views, and the many questions, both posted to the blog and directly to me, I feel like my original objective of the blog is being realized—to inform and hopefully to inspire other modelers. Techniques of modeling, along with prototype information (and ways of acquiring the latter), are central to this. It’s what I had set out to do, and it still looks like it’s working.
Tony Thompton