Blogs, Ego's, and Nerdiness..

I Have been writing this stuff  now for about a month, I can tell you it's alot harder than it seems. Especially for me, I have always hated writing and at school I had to do remedial english... (I was excellent at maths and science... think it's called being a nerd) so I often wonder why I am bothering (some of you may also be thinking the same thought...)

I guess I wanted a place to put some of my ideas down, forums and comments make it hard to actually write as much as I need to explain myself... A chance remark "Ben, that was long enough to warrant it’s own blog!" by Nathan  got me to thinking...

Hopefully I will get better and my posts will get more coherent with practise (although I think alot of my earlier posts were actually better..). I have found some posts turn out OK and others seem to never be right and I fiddle with them for ages before either ditching them in disgust or chucking them on here, and hoping no one actually reads them.

What I end up writing is usually completely different to what I have in my minds eye when I start... It's all very hit and miss. I use spell checker constantly... And call on Karen in to have a look occasionally to make sure it is sort of OK (She finds my posts very boring and technical)

I ask myself how much ego is involved in all of this, and honestly have to say it's probably more than I am comfortable admitting, I check the stats more frequently than is healthy, and stress if I haven't got a post out for a while due to work (like last week) or just me stuffing about trying (without success) to turn the mess I have just written into a masterpiece (like last week)...

The highlight so far for me was John from Attainable Adventure Cruising recommending my blog, thank you John and I hope I won't cause you to regret the recommendation.

Surprisingly some people have come for a look, (mostly poached from Attainable Adventure Cruising) and google has found my site, causing some funny visits. Like the Google France search for "Sailing + Tits" that somehow found my Sextant and Tits on Bulls post, Probably not what he was expecting... Stats to date are 872 hits from some many countries around the world, most commonly being USA, Aussie and Canada.

My most popular (if you can call popular with a measly 88 views) is my Berserk... Lost in the Ross Sea? Post, goes to show bad news sells (we are pathetic creatures really...). 51 people were bored enough to look at Snow Petrel the boring details and 44 looked at the videos page.

Where to from here? I don't know, I am sure my posting frequency will drop. I hope the quality will improve and hopefully more people will comment if they find anything useful, if they disagree with what I have written, or have something to add (thank you Chris at Periodically Peregrine)... I guess I am trying to stimulate some thought, myself included.

I have just modified the layout to make it look cooler, let me know if you don't like it. And I put a followers thing on the page too, who knows - one day I may even get one! See John Vigor's always amusing writing about his followers...

I must admit to being surprised (and abit scared) by the number of visits, hopefully some of you have found something interesting amongst my more coherent efforts, and thanks for coming over and looking.

Cheers

Ben

PS For the fellow nerds out there

It is scary how much information gets tracked isn't it...

	Pageviews by Browsers Firefox  290 (33%) Safari  256 (30%) Internet Explorer  222 (26%) Chrome 70 (8%) Opera  7 (<1%) Mobile  6 (<1%) NetFront  2 (<1%) Pageviews by Operating Systems Windows  509 (59%) Macintosh  211 (24%) iPhone  67 (7%) Other Unix  38 (4%) iPad  20 (2%) Linux  4 (<1%)