Tag: readers

just hanging around

Levis 501s faded jeans hanging on washing line

Just hanging around, posting fairly regular updates but making no particular effort to get noticed, I find I now have 501 blog followers.

Thank you, not only to those who follow, but also to those who just drop by occasionally to read, comment or enjoy the view.

flying visits

This isn’t the busiest blog in the world, and I don’t suppose it will ever have a huge audience, but WordPress send me notifications of new followers and likes, and it’s always nice to think that a post has appealed to readers, even if it’s impossible to know exactly why.

I check the stats page to see if I can find out a little more about who is reading and clicking, but this often poses more questions than it answers. I happened to look just after midnight the other night, just after the numbers had been reset, and this is what I found:

blog visits & views stats
Dear visitor, whoever you are, can you tell me how you managed to travel half way round the world in a matter of minutes and why you read six pages of my blog from three different countries?

what’s not to like?

In a recent email, a friend said he’d “been enjoying” the recent posts on the blog. “But you haven’t liked them!” I retorted. Of course that raised the subject of what the like button signifies to each of us and why some of the posts here are more popular than others.

orange nasturtiums
Which also raises the question of what blogs are for – especially this one – and whether I should be deliberately posting things that I think will generate more followers and likes.
Continue reading “what’s not to like?”

the fear of the word

I started to write about the results of the Mslexia poetry survey yesterday, but ended up going off at a bit of a tangent.

I’d stumbled across a news item on the Poetry Book Society website which referred to the survey under the eye-catching headline “Mslexia Poetry Phobia Report”, and was immediately distracted (yes, my life is full of tangents and distractions) by the phrase “a condition known as metrophobia”.
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‘genderally’ speaking

I mentioned two survey questions last week, which asked about reasons for reading and reasons for writing poetry. At the time, I didn’t say who was carrying out the survey, as I wasn’t sure it was relevant. But what is a survey without results? And now the results have been published, and they raise further points for discussion.

So I’d better go ahead and say that the survey was sent out by Mslexia, which is published with the tagline “the magazine for women who write”.
Continue reading “‘genderally’ speaking”