Serendipity35

Yesterday marked another anniversary/birthday for this blog. I guess it is a "big one" - 10 years, a decade.

When Tim Kellers set up the blog and I wrote that first post - "Why Serendipity35?"  in 2006, it was just a way to test out the software. We were prepping for a presentation on blogs, podcasts and wikis at NJIT where we both worked at the time. That's us in December 2006 in the photo. Tim has a bear sent to him by a blog fan. Yes, we had a groupie back in the day.

The blog now has over 1600 posts. That seems like a lot. I had to grab the calculator to figure out that in those 3650 days, I was posting every 2.28 days. Oh my. That's a lot of blogging.

We know that people are reading, or at least finding the posts, because the internal hit counter for the month of January 2016 shows 782,339 hits. Not a bad month. May 2015 was 2,196,890. We have never figured out what makes one month bigger than another. It's not how many posts I upload. It doesn't seem to be because of the topics I write about or how long or short the posts are in length. The academic year is generally higher than the summer, but not always.

We don't worry much about hits because Serendipity35 is definitely a "non-profit" operation. There are some Amazon and Google ads on the sidebar but all those visitors are not big on clicking ads. Probably some of our most regular visitors are spider bots from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. Hello Bots!

But there is also you, and you are real, and you are reading. Thank you.