I started blogging in 1999. However, I didn't really check how many people were reading what I was writing until 2011. Why?
Because I had promised God that if I survived my heart procedures at Stanford Hospital (next to stanford university) that I would start a blog. Why?
Because everyone else I knew of with the kind of heart virus died but me in California. I even had to change dermatologists because his 29 year old cousin had died of the kind of heart virus I had. My Heart specialist at the time said to me: "You are very lucky Fred! Most people die of this heart virus and we cannot even diagnose what happened to them until after a post mortem after they have already died!"
So, I wanted to Thank God for saving my life so how many people were reading my blog wasn't really important to me yet.
Then around 2011 I started to realize what articles people were reading. I was very surprised at what people were choosing to read at my blog.
What I realized then is that I have many different interests and that I could share many of these interests with my readers and grow my readership that way.
Because there is always what you want to write about and there is also what people actually want to read and unless you figure this out at some point not many people are going to go to your blogging sites.
However, since then likely around 30 million visits to my site. The most for any month was likely over 100,000 visits. However, these types of things come and go in waves as people come to your site or die or do whatever they are doing in life. So, you really cannot expect that all of the same people are going to be visiting your site almost 30 years later like in my case.
Also, I started my first blog in 1999 in June with help from a lady programmer in Canada that I met online who helped me start my first site:
I kept this one page the way I initially set it up. You can see how it was hard to read because I was still trying to figure everything out programming wise in HTML then. Then in 2007 I started this site you are presently reading because I found out it had an encoder called "Compose" here at these blogspot (blogger.com) sites. It was much easier to display all sorts of things better once I started to use an encoder including pictures and this took at least 90% less time to do everything much better then.
So, by 2011 I found the Statistic pages which told me how many people were reading which articles around the world.
This is one of the earliest articles that went viral by the way:
As you can see if you click on this link above it was written in 2010. So, this is the first really viral article I wrote at that time.
However, now I have had around 30 million visits to this site since 2007 so far.
When I first started writing it was to Thank God for allowing me to stay alive when so many others with Heart viruses were dying then. I couldn't even find one person in California in 1998 or 1999 that had survived the type of heart virus I had survived.
So, I'm very grateful to God for keeping me alive so my 2 1/2 year old daughter then in 1999 didn't have to go through life fatherless. At that time my older daughter was 10 and my son was 25 who was born in 1974 when I was 26.
By God's Grace
note: now my youngest daughter is 30, her older sister is 37 and my son will be 52 in about one month and they are all doing well in life.
So, I'm really grateful to God for that.
OH by the way I wanted to show you what one of my first blogs pages was in June of 1999: Just remember this was me just learning more about programming in HTML which I had taught myself with a little help from a lady in Canada I met who was helping me program my first site in HTML online then.
The first part of course is stuff from my dragonofcompassion site and then all the stuff in blue with black printing in those blocks of blue color is one of my first web pages at my first site at geocities.com which lasted until around 2007 or 2009 around there. I started this site you are reading this on in fall of 2007 because I found out it had a built in encoder so I didn't have to program everything in HTML anymroe (which takes about 90% or longer than using an encoder usually).
dragonofcompassion



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