Post 1000...what a long strange trip it's been...so far

When aShortChronicle started in 2011, there was really no expectation it would go on this long.

Yet, here we are more than 7 years later, and post 1000 is now in the books.  It has been a long and sometimes strange trip, but one I wouldn't trade for anything.

Over the years I've learned a lot of lessons.

Never hit the "publish" button if something might benefit from sleeping on it. 

Always trust your gut.  If your gut says something will keep you up at night if you do nothing, then do something. 

You never know where saying "yes" will take you.   Saying "no" is easy, but it is also boring

Persevere until something unexpected happens.

The last one may be the most important when it comes to explaining the level of "success" as gauged in page views achieved by this blog.  It's sort of a personal version of The Stone Cutter's Credo - keep hammering away until the rock splits.

To explain, take a look at the below chart that shows page views by month for aShortChronicle.  This chart represents more than 545,000 page views since the blog's inception, but as you can see it wasn't always running at the numbers it is now.  For the first half of the blog's life, readership was minimal.  Only a few political junkies, town staff, and elected officials would be counted as regular readers.

Then, the first unexpected event happened.

At the end of May 2015 DavidsonNews.net suddenly closed up shop.  That started the upward trend in the graph.  People wanted online information and DNN had boasted of 100,000 regular distinct readers.  While web readership stats are dubious to calculate accurately, surely a chunk of those former DNN readers made their way to aShortChronicle more regularly.  Also, as a result of the Town of Davidson losing its "paper of record", around that same time aShortChronicle began receiving and publishing Town press releases.

The second unexpected event was the rise of Save Davidson.  While yes, there is a core group of Save Davidson activists, that group has created what amounts to a movement that goes far beyond just a few people.  With more than 2200 members on Facebook, Save Davidson has created an interactive platform that makes it easy to get involved in the community.  It also provided a rich source of readers interested in Davidson Town Hall specific stories - just the kind of stories aShortChronicle specializes in putting out regularly.

Take a look at the graph at May 2017.  Save Davidson was still called Save West Davidson's Tree Canopy at that point, but already had hundreds of regular group participants.  That was also the first month aShortChronicle broke 20k page views.  That month saw stories on the Lake Davidson rezoning and the now famous Town Hall showdown between Ralph Clontz and Rick Kline over the sale of the Beaty Street Property to the Town.  Neither of those stories which are still two of the biggest in this blog's history would have happened if not for the Save Davidson community.  That credit to Save Davidson includes both the content of the stories through people met on the platform and the platform itself to distribute them.

The rest of 2017 shows readership continuing to rise through election season, then tail off.  If there is a lesson in the low readership of the current month its that this is a "what have you done for me lately" and cyclical kind of endeavor.

This month has seen the least number of posts for a month since January 2017 (before the graph began its 2017 march upward), and that slow level of posting is also occurring during the summer when people tend to pay less attention to political issues.  That combo equals far fewer page views, but it also means it's been a good time to take a much needed break.  If you are a regular reader wondering about the lack of activity the past several weeks, that's all it means.

When summer ends expect things to ramp back up.  This strange trip isn't over yet.  In the next 1000 posts, there are too many more interesting stories to tell, interesting people to meet, and certainly more interesting and unexpected events over the horizon.  Who would want to miss those?