Fourth Anniversary

      It is September 17th today, time to celebrate this blog’s fourth anniversary. To start the celebration, here is a picture of Dahlia from my garden or let us just call it the ‘flower of the month’ club!

      Now is a good time to review this blog’s performance. In the first year (2007-08) there were 91 posts, second year 53, third year 38 and 19 in the fourth year. So over the past four years I have affectively streamlined the number of posts from 91 to 19 and still received 10,000 to 14,000 hits each year! With fewer posts the readers get more time to enjoy them at leisure and I get more time to synthesize more substance into each post. So it is mutually beneficial As for this past year, here is the gist. Out of 19 posts:

• There were 8 book reviews.
• 2 dealt with architectural analysis.
• One product review.
• Two posts that brought the joy of cultivating white Peonies and the bounty of Lilies to this blog and
•  The rest  were about nature and painting.

     The most popular post of this past year was ‘Stretching the Mind’ followed by ‘Indian Corinthian’. Although I read many books each year, this year I chose to review some books that tapped into the energy of the rapidly changing world, that we live in now. So what has all this blogging led to? Here are the results:

• All the posts made it to the bulletin for ‘best in the WordPress community’.
• A book review written in this blog was voted as ‘ the most helpful favorable review ‘ on Amazon’s web site.
• An article from this blog was republished on M.M.N.Y.’s web site (page 26). In the future one article will be published in each issue of their web magazine i.e. 4 articles per year.
• Got a job offer to be a ghost writer that I have declined.
• Celebrities have graced this blog with their remarks e.g. Cevon (whose gravatar led me to the talk show host named Montel Williams), the actress Kelli Garner, the billionaire Bill Bartmann. Please excuse me if I forgot to notice any other.
• There is an ever increasing deluge of comments on the page titled Architecture.
• The most popular image in this blog turns out to be an old painting of mine. If you google (images section) ‘red and yellow leaves’ then this is what you get. That explains why ‘ Democratic race in red and yellow colors ‘ is the highest ranking post in this blog, so far
• Many of the paintings and photographs in this blog have been appearing on ‘Google Images’. So a lot more people can view them.
• Many more advertisements have started appearing, over which I have no control. They are either in photo or YouTube format. It is interesting to see what ad. appears on which post. On the post titled ‘Red Hot Summer ‘ there was an ad. of a red colored mini cooper
• Somebody left a comment wanting to buy space for advertisement. That makes me wonder if I should privatize and monetize his blog.

      As for the future, I shall be posting 12 posts each year ( i.e. one post per month). For a writer to shine, you need many readers and good topics to write about. To bring in new readers, this blog’s link will be planted in forums where the topics are socially relevant. Also if you as a reader of this blog enjoy any particular post then please feel free to share its link with people who might enjoy it. As for good topics, Neal Gabler says “we are drowning in information, with no time or desire to process it.” Hence I shall continue to write on topics that process the information of the world and the nature lover in me will try to fuse it with the gentility of the changing seasons.

      Before I wrap up this post I would like to thank all of you for your time and attention and special thanks to Lata for reading each and every post, to Kanchan for being this blog’s foremost cheer leader and to Nanabhau for leaving the most thoughtful and eloquent comments. Lastly, to all, spread the word, spread the joy.

Ratna

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Blog Stats: 46,743 hits

For all new comers: Top twenty posts and pages

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

- Golda Meir