It was October 9, 2013, that I started my 40 day blogging challenge. I’m happy to report that I am still going strong and think that maybe, just maybe, this might be a permanent thing in my life.

Some of my readers know my mom and her mom, my grandmother Marion Young. Marion kept a daily diary, which I would argue was the parallel to a blog today. She passed on that tradition to my mother who continues to keep a daily diary in those quaint little books with paper in them.

I would like to think that this peculiar tradition has been passed on to me. Unlike their diaries, mine is open to all, but I still have the goal of leaving my digital breadcrumbs here and in other places like Foursquare (well, now Swarm) and pictures.

In celebration of my one year anniversary, I want to start sharing some of the analytics behind the blog and its readers. But first a few caveats. The first is that since I switched blog platforms during the year, I’m really only sharing eleven months of data. The second is that the analytics for the free wordpress.com platform are, in my opinion, incredibly weak. I spend much of my time at work looking at analytics of our webpages, our blogs, our LinkedIn page and updates, and our advertising. Tools such as Google Analytics are so much more complete and powerful, and it feels like I am back to riding a tricycle after tooling around in a Ducati (shameless plug for one of my ex-coworkers who loves Ducatis and happens to live in perhaps the most perfect place to own a motorcycle, Monterrey, CA).

But here I go. The first one is a chart showing views by month.   In the business world, you would want to see the views going “up and to the right,” but since this is not a commercial blog, I don’t care. The best correlation I can see is that when I post more, their are more views. Duh.

June was popular due to the most popular post yet, one of the pieces I did about the Wild Goose Festival.

September had both volume and popularity, but you’ll have to wait for the post popularity post (did I just write that?) coming soon.

August, the lowest total so far (December ’13 was a partial month), simply had the fewest posts. I was definitely going through a writer’s malaise period, so it will be interesting to see if this happens again.