Hit Me!

January 31, 2015

The title for this page does not mean that we have switched over to a gambling (BlackJack) blog, although the Miccosukee Casino at the start of the Tamiami Trail is on our stopover list. No, no, this is about our old favourite topic of blog hit counts. As we have often explained, it is the hits - the evidence that people are reading what we write - that keep us going. It makes us feel that others are along on the ride with us, and it gives us support for carrying on.

Since you are reading this, you have already contributed one "hit" to the cause! As the tour is about to start in earnest, we see that there are already over 5000 hits. That sounds like a good start, though we don't actually have a tally of how our other blogs were doing when they were just starting off. Just wondering about it gave us occasion to look at the stats for those other blogs. We see that in total, there are 833,877 hits for all of them combined. Wow, that's great!

Of course, there is no money in this, that's not the point. The point is more hits = more fun.

There are a few other ways to interact with the blog, beyond just reading it and creating a hit. The most powerful of these is to make an entry in the Guestbook. This is the way to share a reaction or information, or to have a small dialog with other readers. You get to the Guestbook either by clicking "Contact" or "Guestbook" near the top of each page. You can make a posting just by giving a name and email address, or you can "register", to allow you to "login". If you register you do not really have to provide any new information, but you will receive a username and password. Then the system will remember you and eventually give you the ability to do a couple of other things. For example, you can create your own profile, so others know something about you when they may be having a dialog on a Guestbook. You can also engage in extensive discussions in the "Forums". Two other things you can do are mentioned here just below.

By the way, once you are looking at or for "Contact" you will also see "Steve Miller". Clicking that will bring up our profile page. At the bottom of that page are useful links to all our other blogs.

The places to click to get to our Profile, or to read or contribute to the Guestbook.

Those two other ways to interact with the blog are to give a "rating" to either a page or to any of the photos. This is done with the "rating" link:

You can only give ratings if you have logged in (after being registered). You also have to have been registered for 30 days. The ratings are a potentially neat feature of the web site. From the "Ratings" tab at the right hand side of each page at the top, you can search for blogs, pictures, etc. that have any of a variety of descriptive ratings. Unfortunately, the restrictions about registering and waiting before rating seem to have made the Ratings little used - at least in our blogs. Oh well, now you know about it - maybe you will give Ratings a try!

If you go to the Guestbook, you will be asked for a name and email address. The address will be used to notify you if there is a response to your post.

The choice of ratings you can give to a blog page.

Here is the result of searching this blog right now for any rated pages. Apparently there was one that one person found "funny".

So anyway, here we go, off on another adventure. Tomorrow (Sunday) we will head for Seattle, and early Tuesday is the flight to Fort Lauderdale. Our bikes are already in the van, waiting for us.

No doubt tomorrow will see our traditional nostalgic photo of leaving our green and misty Island. Don't worry, soon enough it should be bright flowers and ocean, and alligators, and birds!

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