The first post for Science and Science Fiction was published back on August 18th of 2016 so today is this blog’s second birthday. To celebrate I decided it might be a good time to take a look back and review a little of the progress.
I’m going to be honest and let you know that at first I wasn’t certain if I’d still be blogging after two years, I wondered if anybody would want to read my thoughts on scientific matters. Well, I have to say that I’ve been overwhelmed by your response. According to the statistics complied by my blog host ipage.com, over the last three complete months I’ve averaged more than 800 readers per day. Two years ago I’d have been happy if you’d told me I’d get 800 readers a month! The image below shows my stats as of yesterday.
The column marked ‘Visits’ shows the number of people on average who come to Science and Science Fiction everyday. Just as important however is the column to the left marked ‘Pages’ which gives the average number of my posts that get read everyday. If you take the number of pages and divide it by the number of visitors you discover that, on average when a person visits Science and Science Fiction they read almost four and a quarter posts!
Another important statistic is the number of people who like Science and Science Fiction so much that they have decided to become registered subscribers of my blog. As of yesterday that number totaled 7,066, almost ten people registering every day! The image below shows the first page of the list of Science and Science Fiction’s registered users which will give you a little look at the blog’s control panel.
Every time someone does register I get an email notification showing me the address and username of each person. I want to assure all of you who have registered that I do look at every notification and I’ve been amazed at the number of people from China or Germany or Bulgaria who have registered. The people who come to read and enjoy Science and Science Fiction live almost everywhere on Earth, strong evidence of the ability of the Internet to bring us together.
But as often happens success brings problems along with it. The comments section of Science and Science Fiction has become the target of an enormous number of backhanded attempts to link the blog to other sites that are pushing pornography, male enhancement drugs, cheap NFL tee-shirts or bootleg copies of recent movies. Everyday I get a hundred or more such garbage comments and immediately trash them. I’m sorry but I’m not going to allow Science and Science Fiction to become a clearinghouse for unethical if not illegal web marketing. Seriously, some of the sites that have tried to push a link onto my blog have been absolutely horrible!!!!
However at the same time I also get two or three genuine comments every day from readers. These comments are usually very complimentary and I try to reply to each and every one of them individually. So just to make it clear, I love to get legitimate comments from all of you out there. However, if you include a link to some other website outside of my control I may very well trash your comment without even looking at it. Sorry but that’s the reality of running a blogsite.
So what are all of you readers out there coming to Science and Science Fiction for anyway? What is this blog all about? Well, in the past two years I’ve published 195 posts so far. That works out to be almost two posts a week.
Of those posts 162 have dealt with topics in science, everything from the Big Bang to driverless cars and artificial limbs and organs. Some of the science posts have even come from scientific lectures or other events that I have attended so occasionally you are getting a little insight into the cutting edge of science. Some of the scientific posts were about topics that I considered to be important for people to be aware of such as the effect of robotics on people’s jobs or the US science budget but most were simply topics about things I found interesting.
Another 28 posts have dealt with science fiction including my reviews of 11 SF books and 10 SF movies. I admit that I would like to do more posts on SF but there really aren’t that many good movies out there and with all of the non-fiction I have to read I’m lucky if I get to read one novel a month.
I have received a good number of comments asking me if running a blog like Science and Science Fiction requires an enormous amount of effort to keep it running. Well, as I said I publish a new post twice a week, and those posts average 700-800 words plus a few pictures. Add in some research so that I know what I’m talking about and you get a good two days of work every week.
So yes, you could say it takes a bit of work to run a blog. However the appreciation and compliments I get from all of you out there who are now reading this makes it worth the effort. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of my loyal readers and assure you that I will do my utmost to make the next year of Science and Science Fiction as enjoyable as the first two have been.
Thanks Again
Robert A. Lawler