The Last Ditch

En route

Blogging will be light to non-existent as I am off to France for a week. I drive from London to Dijon today and then on to the Cote d'Azur tomorrow. I am attending the MIPIM property event in Cannes (as I have every year since 1991). It will not all be business though. I am looking forward to catching up with lots of friends - many of whom are former clients and colleagues. 

Of course there is also the pleasure of about twenty-four hours in the company of Speranza to look forward to on the autoroutes there and back. I do love to be on the road!

Parish Notice: Shortening your links

Your comments are always welcome and I am delighted when you post relevant links to support your case. The 'net natives among you should note that you don't need any HTML code to do so. The platform software converts URLs to links automatically. If your link is very long though, could you please use a URL shortener like goo.gl or bitly.com? Otherwise it throws off the formatting, making your comment unreadable. 

Where I notice such problems I go into your comment and insert a shortened version of the URL but I am not always around to do so. I often read and reply to comments via email, which means it may be some time before I notice one is wonky.

Thanks again for all your contributions. I don't come here to read what I think (because I know already). I come here to read what you have to say.

Stats 2004-6

I was wrong when I said I couldn't graph the data for the first 18 months of this blog. StatCounter is able to do it - and here, embarrassingly, are the results. Click to enlarge and laugh, bearing in mind that - like yesterday's - these are monthly figures!

It may interest new bloggers to see how long it took to find readers. Many of my best efforts were in that period, but as you see they were read by virtually no-one. I still don't quite know why I didn't give up, but I would encourage anyone who has something to say to persist. At the very worst, though few of us will make a difference individually, we will together show future historians that we were not the bland, homogeneous mass the mainstream media's archives will suggest.

The third anniversary of the current version of this blog stimulated all this navel-gazing, which I promise will now end.

Stats 2006 to date

Compared to the big boys, this is nothing I know (click to enlarge and it's still not very big). Still it shows that monthly readership has grown slowly, but steadily, since The Last Ditch moved to Typepad in September 2006. The big early spike, in case you're curious, just shows what happens if you blog against gun control and get picked up by the American blogs. It's a bit sad that the (important) liberty to carry guns is more popular than other liberties, but we must keep trying.

I can't graph the 18 months of The (original) Last Ditch, but the numbers were so small it's perhaps as well.

Thanks for the feedback

More than 50 readers were kind enough to reply to my questionnaire. I think there may be a problem (as always with blogging) that this was a self-selected group of enthusiasts as they were far kinder than I would have been myself. I shall ponder and seek to improve. The graph (click to enlarge) shows what respondents thought about the content. I shall certainly take the advice about Second Life to heart.