Bumbling Along on the Blog

      A fellow I finished high school with had a look at my blog the other day. He made a couple of comments and a compliment. Since school days take me back to the mid fifties I got thinking about the origin of  my blog.

      Now comments and compliments send me to greater wildness. This set off reflections on how I started blogging. 

      The only thing I knew is that I wanted to write. I thought I had some weighty and serious things to say. Many of you will laugh because my blog is not that serious. I was completely naive. I did not have the Internet at my house. I had an email account and had searched the web. I had also used the word processor. 

    So I set up Hiawatha House. I thought anything I wrote would be hung out there on the net and everybody would see it. People would open their computers and there I would be! I would have the world reading my blog. This would so cool! I made 2 posts in the first 4 months. Click here to see my first post. Slowly I began to realize that nobody was reading my blog.

    So fast forward to Blogging for Dummies. A few things made sense to me in this book that was written in very simple terms. I really got hung up on URLs. I couldn't figure out what they were but they were important. One time I bumbled into what a URL was. This brought about many changes and developments but still no readers. 

     I began looking at other blogs. To this point I had not read any other blogs. I bumbled into comments and related it back the Blogging for Dummies. I read comments for a while and finally learned how to make a comment.

    I discovered stat counters. This showed that my readership was between none and very few. Finally I was very surprised to see a comment. I didn't know what it was. To say the least I was very excited.

    Another hurdle was that I did not know how to cut and paste. A friend accidentally asked me to cut and paste something and I though ah ha this is how it's done. I had done cut and paste on the word processor but it had not transferred to the blog. Cut and paste helped me advance by leaps and bounds.

    The learning curve was steep and very slow. I still spent a lot of time with Blogging for Dummies. 

     When I look back I can not understand why I persisted. I just bumbled along and made discoveries. 

     Little did I realize that I would still be blogging in 2014! Little did I realize that I would some day have written over 800 posts. Little did I realize that I would meet many other bloggers and things would develop into a  very interesting and supportive community.

    My blog has become an interesting and time consuming hobby. I can not see giving up blogging.

     Thanks to all the bloggers who have been a part of supporting Hiawatha House.

      Thanks to my high school friend for causing me to go back and reflect on what Hiawatha House has become.

Blog Counter Dilemma

        Blog counters really mystify me. Why can't all blog counters count the same amount? Now I know I'm grouching again and this is a number of posts in a row where I have been grumpy, but I am serious about this problem.

       Shortly after I started my blog I put on one of the free counters. I chose the easiest one to install with my limited technical expertise. I followed it enough to discover what features it recorded. Most of the features recorded were of little or no value. About a year later blogger put a counter on our blogs. I soon discovered that these counts weren't even close. I can't block my cookie on the blogger account so I have to discount the hits when I am on the blog. The blogger counter was always much higher. So I puzzled these things for awhile.

      Then I began to discover that some of my readers were not recorded at all on the counter I installed. I would find that someone would leave a comment and there was no count that showed they had read the post or made a comment. It looks like some of the Word Press bloggers are not sensed for some reason or other.

      I have read about counters. I've read how counters work. I've read explanations of why counters do not come up with the same count. I still don't like it. At least they could be similar or close in their counts. With the technology we have today you would think they could produce counters that would count and be similar with the answers they produce.

      So that's my beef. I just wanted you to know that the counters available do not count in the same way.