Nine years ago today I made my first successful post to Blogger, and a site was born expanded.  Posted my first photos to the blog a month later.

Traffic grew and traffic dwindled and traffic grew and traffic dwindled and the cycles kept repeating and repeating.  I like comments and conversation, but I realize that more and more people use aggregators and sift through post summaries on Facebook and Twitter rather than manually bookmarks all the individual sites of interest.  C’est la vie.

Actually, the non-blog sections get more traffic than any page of the blog itself, mostly thanks to the magic of Google.  What do they look at?  Passport stamps.  Y’all really like  the old travel documents.

The most popular post on the blog itself (at least in the last five years) was one in 2006 about a local high school’s dress code problem.

Thanks to all of you who’ve come, chatted, linked, commented, and in a few rare cases, jumped the great divide and met me in real life despite whatever first impression I’ve given through my rambling here.  You’ve been part of nine great years in my life and are very much appreciated.

Yes, I still hang out here. Just not as often as I used to.

Not exactly sure where Howling Point fits into things as Facebook and Twitter both try and fill the role the place once had. But this is still MY place – the others are places I go, this is where I come home to.

Interesting article at S.F. Gate on the Top 10 searches on the various search engines for the first part of 2008.  For what it’s worth, I don’t think any of those searches would have brought you here, no matter how far down the list of hits you browsed.

Out of curiosity, I checked Google Analytics to see what did bring you here.  Excluding things like variations on the name of the sites, the top 10 for Howling Point for the first part of 2008 are:

1. cal poly
2. cdpuvbhfzz
3. pornanimal
4. pongo
5. pongo dog
6. chuck hartley
7. pongo point
8. red shirt school of photography
9. pongo the dog
10. smoritos

The list was a bit different over at the photo gallery.

1. la jolla rough water swim 2008
2. naked bartenders
3. jason fung water polo
4. ombac rugby
5. stefan partelow
6. james cracknell
7. santa barbara
8. water polo
9. displayimage.php add your comment
10. triton invitational water polo

Yes, the comment spammers’ search for a certain former exploit was the #9 search on the photo gallery.  Now you know why comments were turned off before I switched to a different gallery package in July.

While I’d like to think that the continuing interest in Pongo is due to, well, him, and being the site muse for five years, I suspect it has more to do with being named after a Disney character and sharing a name with a defunct Latin American social networking site (pongo point).

Yes, I’m tinkering.  No, the dust hasn’t settled yet. 

On May 12, 2001, on what was apparantly the second try, I got Blogger to work.  Yep, that means this blog now has seven years worth of posts.  Seven years worth of memories.  Seven years of words and photos attempting to document the journey from there to here, and hopefully, beyond.  Thanks for stopping by and being a part of all that. 

Thinking about Tuesday.  This is awfully advanced planning for me, so bear with us.

It’s Election Day, so normally I’d have the flags up here on the site.  Since I’ll be working at one of the polling stations, I had planned on wearing something from the office casual genre.

But then I realized Tuesday is also Mardi Gras this year.  Fat Tuesday 2008.  Howling Point needs bright colors and teases of flesh.  Chuckie needs to wear beads.

Hmmm.  How to balance this.  Now I’ve got something to think about while the rain washes away my hopes for a good weekend.

Having some home internet issues. Something that my ISP is absolutely certain is not their responsibility is preventing access to part of the internet, including the admin page for Howling Point.
[Via BlackBerry]