First off, let me wish everyone a blessed and happy new year! Ours is off to a great start; snow, baby, bird…this is a happy house. This also marks a rather special time for me personally; it was one year ago that I decided to embark on this little labor of love I called the Bismarck-Mandan Blog.

It was with a post featuring a photo of the capitol lit up with “2006” that I first started this website, which is convenient timing. Every anniversary of the Bismarck-Mandan Blog I can just post a picture of the latest capitol!

Now, on to the shocking stats. I’m both flattered and humbled by the stats counter on my site…not the ones the blog keeps, but the server stats. I get very detailed information about visits to this site, and it’s pretty amazing to watch.

As you can see, the number of people visiting this site has climbed pretty steadily in the past twelve months. I broke a record again this month with 125,572 hits! I also set records for numbers of visiting users at 19,828. November was the busiest month for page views, when people looked at 46,181 pages from the site. Coincidentally, my biggest day was November 14th with 11,171 hits. Wow. I think that was a day I posted about the Fighting Sioux…apparently I’m not the only one with a passion for that issue.

One thing that has puzzled me somewhat is that fewer people rate the posts than read them. Clicking on the dots allows people to enter a rating of 1-5. Another one is comments. Relatively few people leave comments or read the comments. At work we went through a study of how web page users view the sites they visit, and it’s never the way that the designers intended. I guess this site follows suit in that regard.

Thanks again for everyone who has helped with word-of-mouth publicity for this site. I’ve never advertised it — although Phil and Jason have graciously given me mention on KFYR-Radio a couple of times — yet between 500 and 1000 people come to read it every day.

I’m a big privacy nut, so I originally set out to be somewhat anonymous on this blog. I was a hacker in the 80’s who narrowly escaped some big trouble, and failed to escape other big trouble, so I keep my personal information pretty private. I have a family to think about now as well, so that’s why I’m reluctant to post that kind of thing. It wasn’t until late in the year that I actually let a couple of pictures of me hit the web…I guess I’m relaxing just a little bit. I didn’t know if the comments fields would start to fill up with nonsense I didn’t want, or if I’d get flooded with hate mail about some of my opinions, and thankfully that hasn’t happened. So I’ll probably post a little more personally in the future…just a bit.

I was approached this year by the KX network and asked if they could syndicate my blog on their site. I agreed, and we’ve had a good relationship. At the bottom of each of my posts as they appear on KX network sites around North Dakota is a link to my original post on this site. Judging from the referral stats, people like to see the original post, probably because the pictures are shrunk down on the KX sites. Their site sometimes truncates my posts, too. So if you’re reading this on a KX Network site, hop on over to the real deal!

I originally figured this site would just be another voice in a vacuum, a place to park my photography and rekindle my love for writing. To have people find it worthy of their time to view it on a daily basis is pretty amazing. Your support leaves me speechless, really…all I can say is that it feels really great. I look forward to providing more pictures, noteworthy community tidbits, and the occasional inflammatory opinions in 2007 and beyond.