The blogosphere is a funny place

It's been a busy week. The garden, my work at L'Arche and St. Vincent de Paul, and today, laundry, have taken up a lot of time, and I haven't moodled since Monday. But Simple Moodlings has had more hits this week than ever before. The picture below tells why... if you can see what my computer screen is telling me.

It's not a great picture, I know, but it's a shot of Blogger's "dashboard," which gives me all sorts of information about what people are reading here. It shows statistics of how many readers find Simple Moodlings in a day, the search engines that bring them, and how many views my posts are getting. It also says that I'm getting a lot of referrer spam from Russia (lit up in green on the lower right hand corner). What amazes me is the graph... all those spikes mean people have been looking at something... and the list under Posts seems to indicate that even though I've hardly posted anything this week, my Mother's Day Short Story #6 is getting a lot of attention, perhaps because mom appreciation is a fairly universal experience. Well, for me, 185 readers for one post in a week is a lot of attention, since most days there are just barely a handful of readers, period.

Which makes me wonder at the world of blogging. I try to write a little each week for the entertainment of family and friends and a few sort of regular readers that I've noticed from the little Moodlings Map on the right side bar (the towns of readers show up there, so I can sort of guess when I've been visited by a cousin in Halifax and a friend on the BC coast... and I notice when other readers I don't know visit from interesting places like Council Bluffs, Iowa; Neuwied, DE; Paris, FR; Delhi, IN; Dubai, AE; Johannesburg, ZA and lots of other cities and towns I'd love to learn more about). But maybe I've moodled enough that this blog could garner readers for a couple of years without my posting a thing! Not that garnering readers is my goal. I'm just having some fun here, exercising my writing muscles, and making a few friends (who sometimes leave comments, and often don't -- blast that captcha-word-verification-prove-you're-not-a-robot-thingy that discourages internet friendliness).

This past week, I've seen all sorts of interesting places show up on the Moodlings Map. If I could, I'd love to learn a little about the people who come to visit because of a Mother's Day story, and how you plan to honour your moms this weekend. Here, we're having a little barbecue on Sunday night in my back yard under a beautiful, blooming pear tree.

The blogosphere may be a funny place, but at the same time, it's a place where we realize how much we all have in common. Happy Mother's Day to you, and/or to your mom!