Izdihar - Magic Kingdom Escapology

Were you a regular follower of this small but perfectly formed corner of BlogEstate, you may have had cause to notice that there has been a little more going on of late, and you may come to wonder whether there is any purpose behind it. Well you would be right to wonder, for purpose there is, not that it is a great purpose, or at least not on the scale of say a climate change treaty, or whatever they write around such things. No, quite simply it has been an attempt to see if I could post something every day for a full month, that month being November 2009, the month that's drawing very rapidly towards a close. I did say it wasn't a great purpose didn't I?

Looking back over the month, I can see that I did rather better than one a day, the photo archive mining has been of great help as I've gone along the way. Total posts so far, excluding this one, has reached 49, though I think that includes a few that have not seen light of day for a variety of reasons. In that time, I've also made some changes to the blog skin and this has, to my eyes, cleared out a fair bit of clutter and made the whole thing look a lot cleaner - still not too sure about the overall colour scheme, but it does in many ways reflect the place I'm sitting in.

The other thing I've been looking at closely along the way is the visitor stats. The way they were being captured at the start of the month means that I cannot see back to Day 1 now, but I can at least see that number of visitors have increased as a general trend - a testament to the concept that 'Content is King', or 'Build it and they will come' whichever is your preference. It is though with some irritation, that I can see that not only the genuine visitors have been dropping by, but also the spambots. These I can happily lose even though they contribute to overall visitor numbers. It is a little galling to see that over 23% of the visitor figures are made up of the little buggers. At best they just mask the real activity here and at worst they are consuming bandwidth I'm paying for with no good purpose.

One of the other things that I've done over the month is to spend a little more time reading the blogs of others and commenting on the same. I've read some interesting stuff along the way, not least ways, finding someone else who has made reference to that fine measurement device, the Bristol Stool Scale over here at FormerlyFun's emporium. The other thing I've noticed is how often certain blogs can be found cross-linking to each other and then commenting on happenings as they are reported. After a while you do begin to become convinced that the idea of a virtual village and neighbours I've commented on previously, perhaps has more substance to it than I thought. Not only that, the 'community' doesn't necessarily remain virtual and actual physical (non-biblical (that I know of)) interaction is taking place out there. Quite why this should come as a surprise, to someone who has been involved in something like half a dozen forum related meet-ups, I'm not quite sure. Seems people really do like meeting new people with a common interest.

So it's been an interesting month, even if not quite complete. I'm now wondering whether I can keep this going for more than a month. Would that be good, or would you prefer me to STFU now and leave the airwaves alone? What if I were to attempt a Blog365? What if I had to include a photo a day alongside it all? What if I wake up tomorrow and think "What the hell did I just write?". Oh, and you at the back there, stop trying to sneak out, I haven't finished yet...