I Got Six (happy blogging anniversary to me!)

Anyone remember Schoolhouse Rock?  I loved it.  I remember sitting in front of my tv on Saturday mornings, hoping against hope that it would be a day with a new segment. Anyway, apropos of nothing, when I thought about blogging for six years, the song from Schoolhouse Rock, "I Got Six," immediately popped into my head. Maybe that's just me. 

Six years have gone by in a flash. When I started the blog, my nephew was in elementary school - now he's going to be a senior in high school.  I never thought I'd worry about him more now than I did when he was little, but hello.  I do.  But I worry about a lot of things more now than I did then.  More on that in a bit.  Blog-wise, the past year has seen a lot of the same old, same old, though I have had quite a few more "big hit" days. I even had a day where I received over 400 hits!  Again, I know this is small potatoes in the scheme of internet things, but to me, the online notice is crazy.  I've had hits from Bahrain, the Ivory Coast and Brunei.  I mean, come on?!  Someone in those countries read something I wrote?!  Oh brave new world...

Or crazy new world.  Just to be off-topic for a bit - I find myself self-editing on my blog all the time.  More than usual, I mean. I've been taking the denial and avoidance that I've referred to before a little bit too far, perhaps. I don't really talk about the fractures in my family. I don't talk about what little I've been doing to resist the crazytown that's going on in this country. If I see a show and don't really enjoy it, most of the time, I won't blog about it. There's so much hate and unhappiness all around me, I'm loath to add to it. I guess I could take the "...with a little TMI thrown in" descriptor off my blog and that would cover the fact that I'm not really sharing everything that's going down in my world. 

But part of me wants to express more.  Maybe it's due to my new therapist.  Maybe it's an extension of the original impulse I had to start this blog: the people in my life are probably tired of hearing me whine, complain and vent, so if I just write it down on the internet, I'll have gotten it out of my system and no one will really read it.  I just don't know.  It's a struggle for me.  Will I really feel better revealing extremely personal insights?  Sharing my fears and anxieties about what's happening around me?  Especially when I see that the country that has the second-most views of my blog is Russia?  How can that not make me nervous?!  Though I'm sure it's the ballet reviews and nothing more nefarious than that... I think as a test, I'll post photos at the end of this post that show where I'm coming from right now.  We'll see what happens from there.

Anyway, to get back to the blog.  In the past six years, I've written 697 posts that have been looked at 44,457 times (if I'm reading the numbers correctly, that means I did 107 blog posts that were viewed over 10,000 times since last year's anniversary).  Crazy, right?  My all-time list of most-read posts has stayed mainly the same as last year, with one interesting new entry (I think the post was linked on another, more popular, blog and that's why it got so many hits):

• ABT - Sleeping Beauty, 7/7/11, 366 views
• ABT Fall Season - GUEST BLOGGER ALERT, 11/13/13, 338 views
• Review - The Healing, 6/17/16, 289 views
• Review - The Rascals, 5/1/13, 276 views
• My 22 minutes as a cable tv/game show star, 7/6/13, 185 views

My list of most-read posts since last year's anniversary is also interesting to me; again, I think being linked by other sites has helped me out here.  I guess I need to figure out how to make that happen more often to really boost my stats:

• Review - The Healing, 6/17/16, 289 views
• GUEST BLOGGER ALERT - Pumpkinpalooza, 94 views
• Review - Sunday in the Park with George, 92 views
• Review - Small Mouth Sounds, 7/13/16, 81 views
• Review - Good, 7/28/16, 80 views

I could probably share my blog posts more often on social media.  I do get more hits when I tweet or post on Facebook.  But do I really want more hits?  I guess I need to decide if I'm just writing an online journal that a few people I know will read, or I really want to SAY something and I want LOTS of people to read it.  After six years, you'd think I'd know what I want.  But no, not really, not so much...