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The Lyons Den is three months old today!
Posted by Graeme Lyons , Sunday, 25 July 2010 12:34
I like statistics. Most of my summer is spent collecting data and most of the cold, bleak winters are spent indoors compiling, analysing and interpreting that data. So, I am going to give a brief update on some stats of my blog. I am going to continue to try and blog every day though I am not sure how this will work in the winter but I'll give it a go. As with most things in my life it has become an obsession but for the meantime, a relatively healthy one! Most days it's quite effortless to find a subject to blog about, occasionally I have to look a little harder but I do carry my camera more often than I used to now and 'what I'm going to blog about next' is always in the back of mind. I never intended to blog with such frequency when I set it up but it fits with my obsessive nature and seems quite natural.
So, in three months I have had 601 unique visitors from 20 countries and 29 people are following the blog. There have been 1579 visits and 2915 page visits. This is the 84th blog entry during this time. My most visited blog entries were 'When spiders look like green cats', 'Eight-legged Freaks!' and 'First for Sussex!'. This has really taught me that the naming of blog entries has a lot to do with how many people look at them. Using a Latin name (as I did with the entry 'Anaglyptus mysticus' - what I thought was a well cool Latin name and even smarter looking beetle) seems to be a great way to turn off the reader. As does not submitting a photo. My personal favourite blog was the one I named 'Size IS everything!' with the photo of a Stag Beetle running away from my new tattoo.
So what started really as a way to share my sightings and to create an on-line diary has actually taken on more substance than these original ideas. It already influences how I do natural history. One thing that I didn't really plan on was the content, I seem to particularly like blogging about small things that don't usually get much press (beetles and arable weeds for example) and anything that has unusual behaviour or a story to go with it (such as mimicry). Anyway, one of my main goals was to create a natural history blog without the tweeness, there will be no 'skipping through the bluebells' here. I hope I have achieved this! In three months time it will be the end of October and there will be very few plants, moth and beetles to blog about so things might be very different then but I hope to still be as active with it as I am now. Fungi and bryophytes here we come! Or maybe I should invest in a bigger camera and take photos of birds too?...
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Happy anniversary, Graeme! Bring on the leafy liverworts!