At school one of the playground sayings was “The first sign of madness is talking to yourself”. This is obviously deeply entrenched in my psyche because I began to fear that blogging was possibly a sophisticated way of talking to myself. However it is possible to check that messages reach an audience. Almost one month ago I installed the WordPress Jetpack plug in to the university blogs that I contribute to. Despite it’s name the Jetpack is not some James Bond device for high speed travel but a toolkit to monitor blog access.
Screenshot of Jetpack information provided by WordPress
What has (almost) one month of data gathering told me? To my relief I can see that there have been 600 page hits to the blog in less than a month (a lucky chance that i happened to check the stats just at visit 600), that visits are spread among the entries and that the main Google hits are for Calathea lutea, greenhouse labelling and, of course, the blog home page, while today’s top hit is the new blog on our common ginger plant coming in to flower. This seems a pretty good start to blog use for the tropical glasshouse and is helping me to plan future blogs around popular themes.
