Nine months ago today, Meg posted our first post on Shifting the Balance.  Since that time our lives have moved forward.  Meg has developed a rewarding pattern to her life in Petaluma. I particularly enjoy the times we all spend together and with other close family and friends.

If you aren’t a blogger, you will have missed one of the curious aspects of blogging. WordPress keeps track of visitors to our blog on a country by country–not individual–basis.  We are now up to 82 countries.  We haven’t figured out how to get the attention of any one of Greenland’s 56,000 residents, but we are still trying. In addition to keeping a tally of every country with visitors to our blog, WordPress actually includes a map for Meg and me.  Here is the map for our blog.  Red records this highest number of visitors, which are from the United States, and visitors from every other country are highlighted in orange, indicating a slightly lesser number of hits:

It is to really fun to watch to see which of our posts are the most popular.  Our photographs usually get views within minutes or a couple of days.  Our articles may receive very few views the day they are posted.  But they may continue to receive views for months.  The most popular of our posts are Meg’s 4 posts focused on Natasha’s wedding and my post comparing Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice.  It is also really rewarding to receive notification that someone “likes” our blog or has commented on a post.  Most of those who “like” us are individuals who view our photographs.  (They are a fairly tight community).

One of our most faithful readers is a young man from Romania, Cristian Mihai.  Born in 1990, he is already an author and a very active blogger himself.  Christian, thanks for regularly “like”ing our photographs.  We love your stuff!!  Romanian music is pretty cool.  Thanks and good luck.

Blogging has become a part of the rhythm of our lives.  Most of our posts capture the fun times of our lives: weekends Meg and Jake spend learning about Northern California, and visits Terry and I make to points of interest in Kansas City.  Occasionally, we write about our travels.  When time permits we review a book or write about issues that are of particular interest to us.

There is supposed to be an art to blogging. Among the suggestions made for successful bloggers is to have a blog theme: something like marketing, travel, photography or cooking.  We read some wonderful specialized blogs and follow Sheila’s Lifestyle Solutions and PhotoBotos among others.  So we really appreciate the specialized blogs. But we just keep rolling along as we write about a wide variety of subjects and post photographs we like.

Our lives are, in some small ways, focused on our blog.  We talk to each other about what we are doing on the blog and who has a post ready for publication.  We also continue to look at our lives and our worlds with eyes toward potential blog posts.  When we see a beautiful building, a fascinating book or article, or just visit a park, we want to share it.  Our posts are also a way for us to communicate with each other. That is satisfaction enough for me.

Thank you for following our blog. Clotilda Jamcracker, (another author and blogger), thanks for “like”ing this post.  Thanks to you all.