Thank you, dear readers

In the '80's and '90's I had a little bit to do with community radio.  

In Warrnambool I took media classes in high school which did little except train me to structure an hour of radio and prepare me for a lot of change in storage mediums.  There was a memorable evening with my brother at the community station there when I burnt out their magnetic cartridge-wiper by leaving it on too long.  Damn analog technology!

In Bendigo (where my parents lived while I was at university ca. 1989-1992) I actually trained to present radio programs, and was on air a few times.  But it wasn't possible, in those days, to get any immediate idea of how many people were listening or what they thought of what you were doing.  The internet was but a glint in the eye of the computer geeks at university.  There was no form of instant feedback if you were speaking into a microphone and hoping your track selections were providing pleasure out in the ether.  If you think there are self-indulgent wankers on the air now, imagine what it was like then.

How times have changed.  Now I can click a few links and find out how many distinct readers have looked at my blog, what country they're from, and what browser and OS they're using.  I can break this down by day or by post.  It's very  helpful in terms of working out what sort of writing works best for this audience.  

That's a darn sight more information than I had 20 years ago on radio.  That's probably a good thing, because knowing what people thought on the day I broadcast this may have left me an emotional cripple.

From the information at my disposal I know that my audience is primarily people I know, and I know that this is mainly because I only promote the blog through Facebook.  This doesn't bother me, because I'm just stretching my writing muscles at the moment.  And, for the record, my TARDIS construction post is the all time most-read post.  Thank you!

I'm addressing this topic because we've recently passed 500 page impressions here at Using The Good Plates, almost all of them in the past two weeks.  Not record-breaking by any measure, but for someone hoping for a few page impressions a day, this is lucky-shop-hop stuff.

I'd like to thank all of you who have been interested enough to click the links and read what's spouting out of my brain and into the keyboard.  I'd be even more grateful to have more feedback than I have to date, but really I'm just happy that people are finding what I have to say interesting enough to look at.

Cheers.