Click Here for an Apology and The Full Blog

I must apologize to my regular readers for throwing a curveball with yesterday's post. With the shorter email notifications you need to click HRodenberger's Blog at the top of the email, or just under that, the title of that day's post, e.g.: Click here for an Apology and The Full Blog to be directed to full post on the blog website.

This is the beginning of the third year I've had this blog and until now I've left it to find its way more or less by itself. Readers who wanted could sign up for email notifications of new posts. After signing up they would receive notifications of new posts in the form of the complete post in a rather plain form. If they clicked on the hyperlinks shown above, they would jump to the website where the post would be fully formatted and the photos would be displayed properly. I suspected many readers didn't know or just didn't bother to make the jump.

Lately I have been reading the administrative background and instructions from Blogspot. I found that there was a way to send out a short "leader" type introduction to the post with the notification email. If people were interested in reading the full post they could click on one of the links and go to the regular website.

Going to the full website would serve two purposes: One, they would see the post properly formatted and with pictures displayed the way I intended and, two, since Blogspot tracks visitors (anonymously) I could track the interest my readers had in the various topics about which I wrote. When they read the post in the email, that reader doesn't show up in the statistics for that day.

As I say, the statistics are collected anonymously so I never know if any particular person has read a post, or even visited the website but, overall, they are quite interesting. There are numbers for the total readers, pageviews by post, by country, by operating system and by browser. They also track referring URLs and referring sites.

So far this week, there have been 17 pageviews for the Phonak post, five for the VA post and one for the Tangerine Orchard post from November, 2015. So far there have been visitors from The USA, France, Germany and India. Some posts (for instance, the various posts from Vietnam and the one on climbing Mt Fuji) seem to get views at least once per week and some posts only get a few one time and are seldom viewed again.

If I know what interests people I can write more on those general subjects. Or not. I'm not trying to go commercial or make money on this blog, but I'd like to post on things that interest you.

Hopefully it hasn't been too much trouble to make the switch to the new notifications. I hope you are interested enough to stay with me. Let me know via the comments, or email, if you have a subject you'd like to read about.