Thursday, June 30, 2011

Quinquennial Report


Last month, this blog quietly crossed the five year mark. I have debated whether or not to have a post about it, and decided to do it, keeping self-indulgence to a minimum by writing to the extent possible, about you, the reader of the blog, rather than about its author or any pretense of accomplishment for having sustained it for five years.

It turns out, you're out there, readers of the Super Martyrio blog!, and I wanted to thank you for your readership, and I especially want to thank the few of you who follow this blog. I encourage any reader who wishes to do so to become a follower of the blog and I promise not to hound you or share your information, etc. It would just be nice to know who you are. Along the same lines, I want to urge you to drop me a line now and then--in the comments section at the end of each blog entry--anything that strikes you as significant. Of course, I hope it's nice and civil, but dissent, constructive criticism and useful suggestions for topics are all welcome. If you really want to help us out, you might email an entry you like, post it to social media, etc. Whatever you can do to help will be appreciated.

Who you are: The chart above shows the volume of people viewing this blog for the last two years. If you knock out the three big spikes (Oct. 2010, Mar. 2011, and this month), you can see that the trend is steady growth. By the way, the three peaks were times when we were cited in Tim's El Salvador Blog. Thank you Tim, and Tim's readers, for visiting this blog. (Stop by, anytime!) Most of you are located in the United States, but I am glad to report that El Salvador is the second largest audience, though it lags way behind the USA. Canada, England and Spain are also significant. More recently, the readership has gotten more happily diverse -- for example, this week, I am happy to greet readers from France, Germany, Spain, Austria and even Malaysia. Wikipedia, Google, and Tim's Blog are the largest traffic sources for the blog.

The most popular post on the blog so far is the entry on the four pastoral letters of Archbishop Romero. Even though readers in officially English speaking countries vastly outnumber readers in Spanish speaking countries, the popularity of this entry in Spanish tells me that many people in the U.S. (an official English speaking country) must be reading my Spanish entries, too. Of course, it also tells me that people are interested in Archbishop Romero's teachings, because that is what his pastoral letters are all about. It also tells me that people entering that as a search term in a search engine, are finding this blog. All of those things are reassuring, because the principal motivation for doing this blog is to be a resource and offer that information to anyone who is interested.

Thank you and warm regards!

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