Photo by lowjumpingfrog
Top Five Referring Sites for February:
1. Simple Mom
2. Simple Kids
3. Hollywood Housewife
4. Tulip Girl
5. Simple Organic
Top Five Posts (by page view) for February:
1. On Feeling Called to Public Schools
2. Of Mermaids and Moral Dilemmas
3. When Extremists are Taken to the Extreme
4. Coconut Oil and the Real Food Movement
5. Little Life Lessons (learned at the mall)
Now then. I want to say a word about comments.
A few days ago, Megan (Velveteen Mind) wrote a brilliant post about the passionate relationship between a blogger and her stats. It's a great read for bloggers and non-bloggers alike. I can say with all honesty that stats have never been that big of a deal to me. If you look way down in the bottom of my right sidebar, you'll see a link to my Sitemeter. It's open, meaning anyone can click on it at anytime and view my basic stats. SortaCrunchy gets way, way, way more hits than it should and certainly more these days than it ever has, but I've had an open Sitemeter since the day I installed it when 30 hits a day was a pretty good average.
But comments? Oh my. Another issue altogether.
I've sketched out about three paragraphs of my thoughts on blog comments, but let's don't do that.
It comes down to this. I used to find validation and fulfillment in the comments left on my blog.
Used to.
Two things changed that for me:
1) The Great Comment Fast during Lent 2009 during which God gently worked on my heart to refocus on my real worth and real value. You're probably tired of hearing me say it, but it really was the best thing I've ever done in the time I've been blogging. Also, during that time I received emails from a few readers who normally never commented, but just had to share a quiet response. It helped me to remember that even when no one says anything out loud in response, there are a few still reading.
2) The time I spent as editor of Simple Kids helped clarify why all this online talk is so important to me. I never thought of SK as my blog. It was created by Tsh and she entrusted it to me. At SK, I genuinely felt as though I were simply the facilitator of conversation. When comments were sparse at SK, I didn't take it personally. I was, after all, writing to parents who were trying to focus their time and energy on parenting - not on commenting on blogs, right? That mindset easily translated to my feelings about comments here.
Something wonderful has happened here in the past few months at SortaCrunchy. There have been more comments, which yes, is nice, but y'all. The depth of discussion you all are providing in the comments far outweighs my original posts! By far! And that is illustrated wonderfully by those top five posts I've listed above. The comment discussion has just been incredible.
I'm starting to feel like a conversation starter and facilitator again, and I love that.
Thank you for taking the time to add to, polish, round out, and enliven the discussions I start here. Y'all are amazing and incredibly appreciated by me.
And now, guess what? Comments closed today. Hope your Friday is splendid.
