Fink Blog is five years old!

Honestly, I wonder how many blogs make it to five (well, most of them probably, but make it to five still being regularly updated)...? In fact, how many *websites* manage to make it to five? Consider for a minute that the entire World Wide Web (as we know it) is only about 16 years old (which is when it went free and public) - my blog has been around for about 31% of that time - which is pretty incredible when you stop to think about it...even the mighty Facebook isn't four years old yet... ;)

Despite this, I have to admit that this blog had a rather shaky start to the year...I mean, five years is an awfully long time to dedicate to anything, and it's clear my amount of posts (although not my enthusiasm) has steadily slowed down over time...however, with Baby Thomas being born 2(.5) important things happened -

1) I gained a huge new source of inspiration for things to write about
1a) My blog was moved by Google into a "talks about kids a lot" folder (just click the "next blog" button a few times and you'll see what I mean)
2) All my available time to write seemed to vanish like a magician yanking a tablecloth from under some crockery

- at one stage earlier this year, Flyingpops turned to me and said "Are you ever going to update your blog again?" and it actually shocked me, my lack of posts definitely hadn't been a conscious thing...to put it in context, for the past few years, I've found writing something that seemed to come quite naturally to me...I don't say that in a pompous way, simply that it takes a certain amount of discipline to put finger to keyboard some days (I pity paid columnists with daily deadlines), but luckily I'm not normally fishing around for ideas, some weeks I'm even 3 or 4 days ahead of myself with posts (because I have so much I want to say)...In fact - confession time - I even wrote these words ahead of time, back on the 18th March..

Hopefully I'm firmly back in the saddle now, but the birth of my son has obviously forced me into an almost total system reset, it feels like all the separate elements of my life were thrown completely into the air, and only now are they settling back down again into some sort of sensible order...so, sorry Fink blog, for the lack of attention, but I think I'm back now... ;)

Oh and feel free to switch off right now, as the rest of this post is dedicated to statistics - So, looking at all time, I've now had 248,250 visitors (last time I checked, when this blog was three years old that figure was 83,626 visitors), or an average of 568 visitors a day (compared to 293 visitors)...these lucky people have arrived from 163 (compared to 83 two years ago) different countries - the vast majority are from the US, UK and Canada (as you would imagine), followed by Australia, Germany and the Netherlands (then rest of EU and ROW)...

Posting-wise, I've written a total of 1778 posts over the last 5 years, or an average of 0.97 posts per day (which actually sounds like just about the right amount to me)...

Popularity-wise, I've had some *huge* spikes over the last year, largely thanks to my content being listed on either Digg, stumbleupon or Delicious, my most visited posts have basked in almost 30,000 views, the average dwell time for a visitor is 2 minutes 23 seconds...

My Flickr stream - when I last wrote about this - had 4933 pictures, viewed (between them) 427,404 times (not including me)...it's now 8390 pictures, viewed 1,034,857 times...On average (at the moment) 465 different pictures are viewed each and every day...Although obviously some pictures get more attention than others...my most popular picture has been viewed 24,330 times (and is no longer a picture of 7/7)...

So, help me blow out my candles, and wish me Flyingpops, Thomas and I many happy returns... ;)