Blog anniversary

It has been one year since I started this blog. It began as a vehicle to highlight some of the work we do to maintain the property of Mink Meadows. It has been interesting and mostly fun to try and come up with topics to discuss. Golf course maintenance can be very repetitive. We mow a lot of acres of grass and do it daily so because that is what you see mostly it is easy to assume that is all we do. Hopefully throughout this past year there have been enough varied topics to highlight some of the other work done to maintain the property. The hard part now will be not duplicating the same topics or at least to show them in a different light.

I want to share some of the stats that I can retrieve at any time on the traffic to the blog:
this is the 93rd post

Page views today

25

Page views yesterday

20

Page views last month

713

Page views all time history

4,591

 

Posts

Root Pruning in January Jan 5, 2011 136 Page views

Lime / Gypsum application Mar 25, 2011 85 Page views

back in the saddle Oct 12, 2011 70 Page views

Golf Club Road Drainage Project Jan 20, 2011, 1 comment 58 Page views

Melt Down! of sorts Jan 19, 2011, 1 comment 22 Page views

Almost 5,000 page views in a year. I think that is pretty good considering I had no idea what to expect and wrote a lot of posts wondering if anyone was reading. I received a few comments throughout the summer referencing a recent post and that was encouraging. I continue to hear of a few that are checking in so the experiment was successful. How a post about root pruning became and remains the most popular is still a mystery.
Other data I can see is where the hits come from: mostly USA (3806) but also all over the world; 29 hits from Denmark, 84 from Russia! What type of browser and operating system, which referring sites such as minkmeadowsgc.com and a host of others are directing people here. Search keywords that brought them to the blog such as "root pruning" 15 times or "lime or gypsum better for lawns" 10 times. Pretty cool stuff.

Recently I struggled with my latest newsletter article specifically because I was asked to write about the bunkers we rebuilt and to refer people here to see pictures. I did not want to duplicate the blog in the newsletter and risk turning readers away when they came here or versa visa. That gave me the focus of creativity for the newsletter article. The first one I wrote had some interesting insights to the bunker work and explained the traditional architect and builder process. It was rife with tangents and did not flow well. The second version, which I assume will make it to print, has the same basic premise of the creative side to restoring bunkers. An interesting thing happened, quite by mistake, as I was writing: I never mention specifically which bunkers. I realized this and thought "this might actually work to draw people to the blog". So for those who have read the blog posts about the bunkers already it is a twist on the project and for those that have not, you should be drawn here to at least find out which bunkers were done. You will have to let me know how the concept worked. My biggest fear was to regurgitate the same verbiage from the blog post in the newsletter. Easy to do when discussing the same project.
I have tried to highlight or at least include the staff as much as possible in the posts. After all the staff is doing all the work. You will occasionally see me in a post but that is only when one of us remembers to take that picture. I try to use visual images to stimulate topics. Often it works but I have kicked myself countless times for forgetting to take a picture which would have helped a post or inspired one. If anyone has a specific topic they would like to see discussed in detail please let me know.
Here's to a happy first birthday and an exciting second year!