As The Pizza Cooks — Episode 25

My last “As The Pizza Cooks” episode had very good stats. 107 likes, 158 views and 31 comments. Discounting the fact that half the comments are mine, that’s not bad for one of my posts. I should add that this is the first time in about five years that I checked the stats on one of my blog posts. The only reason I really noticed how many likes I have is that I’ve been getting a lot of email about it. Well, actually, WordPress has been sending me a lot of email about it. When I started this blog 13 years ago there was a setting that said, “Get email for: Likes, comments, etc” and I just checked everything. Never changed it. I’m not even sure where that button is anymore. It seems like somewhere, the WP folks changed the admin interface and nothing is where it was. Maybe I’d know more about it if I checked that kind of thing more than once every five years.

Honestly, I don’t blog for stats, but I do get a bit of a thrill when I get that little email that says someone left a comment or clicked the like button. I know that you’re thinking that’s a lot of email to be looking at, but honestly I just set some filters in gmail and all that stuff goes to a folder I check once in awhile. Comments are special though, I do read those and reply. Maybe I don’t say something world shattering in the reply, but I try.

My father always used to say that I was trying.

Anyway, I do have spam filters set on the blog so most of the junk comments never see the light of day and I don’t allow URL links in comments unless I approve them so I have a little control there. Once in a rare while a spam comment slips through the filters and I have to manually delete it. It’s actually rare that I end up deleting a comment and even more rare that I have to block a user. It’s happened, just not very often.

When I started blogging that was one of my fears, that I’d just start getting annoying, rude or hateful comments. It’s not happened. Mostly because I think people head towards FaceBook or other social platforms to be disrespectful.

Turns out that I mostly get really nice comments and well, it’s one of the reasons I blog — for the feeling of community. I’ve followed some blogs for years and regularly comment on them. Maybe not brilliant comments, and sadly there isn’t enough time for me to comment on all the blogs I follow. I checked and there are about 600 blogs on my following list. 90 percent don’t post anymore and I haven’t gone back to clean up the list.

Honestly, I’m constantly amazed that people stop by and comment on my posts. I’m grateful that you do stop by with a comment or two.

I have been wondering why my last pizza post did so well. Maybe because I was talking about blogging. Blogging seems to be a hot topic for a blog post. If I was trying to do blogging “right” I’d learn from this and post more about blogging.

But I only check stats every five years, so even if I did start posting more about blogging, it will be a long time before I figure out if that is getting me more views and comments.

Well, that’s it for this week, likely I’ll post something next week, but you never know what I’ll do.

About Andrew Reynolds

Born in California Did the school thing studying electronics, computers, release engineering and literary criticism. I worked in the high tech world doing software release engineering and am now retired. Then I got prostate cancer. Now I am a blogger and work in my wood shop doing scroll saw work and marquetry.

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