Thank You, Dear Readers

Yesterday morning when I posted the blog, I was very close to another milestone, which quietly arrived without notice or fanfare from me as I worked.

For bloggers that are famous and bloggers that attract huge traffic to their sites, this milestone may not seem like much.

But for me, who started with nothing except an idea and a desire to build, it's enormous.

I'm talking about total reader views. 

Yesterday, I hit 300,000 total views since I began this blog on Aug. 1, 2010.

Yes, it's taken a long time to reach it.

Back in 2010, when my daughter Sarah Stegall offered to help collect recipes for the BryonySeries cookbook, she became so entranced with the project, she created the Bryony Facebook page as a Mother's Day gift (I had no idea how to start a page and probably still would need help today) and the next month, she offered to build a website (She had no idea how to build one. But she had the time, at the time, to figure it out and she did).

Then she created a Twitter account and a Flickr account (we've never used the latter). I'd read authors should have something called a blog. She researched that and set up this blog. then she researched SEO, keywords, and hashtags. For the first year, I wrote the blog (based on Sarah's ideas because I had no idea what to write) and she tagged them because tagging was a concept I could not grasp.

We cheered the first few views, the first double digit views, the first 50, the first 100.

With blogging nearly every day, it took almost six years to the day to reach that first 100,000 in total views. And we cheered that, too.

The next 100,000 took just fifteen months. That number got a bit of a boost late last year when I began blogging twice a day to attract a wider audience. Since the start of the blog, I'd posted links to all my feature stories on Friday, a story round-up. But the bulk of my work since I became an employee in 2014 doesn't have a byline and yet contains valuable information for the Joliet area community: local events and the great projects people are doing. 

So I began adding links to those in a second blog, posted in the evening, as a way of letting readers know those stories are available, too. The analytics show some people are reading them.

And we attained the third 100,000 in slightly less than nine months.

Since that time, my youngest daughter Rebekah Baran has become my partner in all things BryonySeries.

Every now and again someone mentions to me he or she reads my blog. Every now and then someone posts a comment on Facebook. Overall, I really have no idea who you area. Comments on the blog are even more sparse than the ones on Facebook.

But the analytics also show all those views aren't (albeit some probably are). I hardly ever have huge jumps in traffic that would alert me to bots.

Most of the traffic comes from Facebook, followed by Twitter, and then Google. 

Whoever you area, I'm thankful. Thankful, thankful, thankful, thankful.

And so I'm sharing this with you today. Because it's your milestone, too, probably more than mine.

Without you, dear readers, there would be no milestone to celebrate.