The number I was actually watching

I started this blog on August 6th. I had no plan past the first post, and I did not know what keeping it going would actually take, so I posted a few before I told anyone it existed.

The number I was watching that first month was not traffic. It was whether I would still be doing this in a week. Would the writing hold up against everything else on my plate? Would I run out of things worth saying? I did not know, and the quiet way to find out was to not make it a thing yet.

Somewhere in there, the traffic became something to watch too. The lifetime number Cloudflare gives me is 6,166 unique visitors, and 16,048 page views behind that, so whoever showed up mostly stuck around for more than one page.

What actually surprised me was not the number. It was where it came from: 91 countries. The United States, sure, and Germany, Japan, the UK. But also Burkina Faso. Bhutan. Kosovo. Mongolia. Nobody in any of those places knows me. Nobody was pointed here by a company newsletter. They found a blog about Civil 3D automation and ACC integrations written by one person, and they read it anyway.

(One of the 91 on the list is "Tor," which is a network, not a country. I am leaving it in, because it made me laugh, and because it is an honest reminder that this kind of data is never as clean as a milestone post wants it to be.)

I did not start this to hit a number. I started it to see if I would keep going, and I only know the answer because I kept going long enough to have visits worth counting. So thank you, wherever you are reading this from, for a blog you had no reason to find.

Be Better - keep posting before you know if anyone's reading.