As of today, my website is now two years old.
Well, technically I got a message some few days ago from WordPress saying that day was the two year anniversary.
Regardless, I tend to see July 1st as the anniversary day since that is more or less around the time I finished writing my first article that you can find here.
Since then, we are now 885 articles deep into this website with the one you are reading now going to be the 886.
A total of 886 articles in two years with a total of 1,862,188 words among all of those articles.
Keep in mind also there are like 10 or more old articles I took offline because I want to edit them a little bit more.
But let's just go with the 886 article number.
After I passed 800 articles anyway (which was my original goal to keep the same pace of 400 a year), I was thinking of maybe shooting for 900 but never got around to it because I've been busy with other things like spending literally 7 hours a day walking around random areas of Mexico City to take photos.
And also, for those curious, I've been editing this long article I wrote here on Mexican foods to try. The list used to have 45 things to try when it was first published but now has 114 foods to try as of this writing on July 1, 2022. Check it out (no, seriously -- check it out. I easily gained 5 pounds making it and one of you better read it)!
All together, it's about 2101 words on average per article when you do the math.
To be fair, there's a bit of repetition given sometimes I repeat old stories that are relevant for multiple articles or sometimes I just repeat myself in general.
There could be and will be some "cleaning up" in the near future when I go through all of my articles so far and just do a "brief editing" on each one.
Outside of that, my website is finally picking up a tiny bit in terms of traffic.
Over the last 9 months, the website has seen steadily increasing traffic where it seems Google is finally being nicer to my website by giving certain articles more exposure.
Which is nice given that I have literally done nothing whatsoever to better improve the SEO of my articles, get backlinks or anything.
That will change soon in the future also when I actually do begin "brief editing" of all of my articles.
But, as I said, traffic is going up regardless.
This month of June 2022 was the first month where I finally passed 1,000 views.
The month before in May I had 860 views.
Then, for the month of June, the website almost doubled in traffic where I had 1,500 views exactly with 834 visitors and an average view per visitor being 1.80.
Even though those numbers are very small for any blog (especially given the amount of content I've put out and compared to any blog I have that makes money), it's still crazy to think about how 834 individual people saw my blog last month.
Since I started this website, I've technically had 4,932 individual people come across my website.
Again, in terms of internet numbers, that's basically being non-existent but it's still cool to me.
That's the same as every single person in an entire town in any Latin American country having found my website.
Let's contemplate for a second (based on a population of 5,000) which random Latin American towns have seen my website by country:
Progreso, Mexico: Population 4,630
Utica, Colombia: Population 4,941
San Fernando de Atabapo, Venezuela: Population 5,000
Iturbe, Paraguay: Population 5,012
Aguacate, Cuba: Population 5,000
Papudo, Chile: Population 5,026
Muy, Muy Nicaragua: Population 4,839
Coronado, Panama: Population 5,000
Humble progress, no?
If I keep this blog alive over the next 50 or 60 years (assumingly when I die more or less), then maybe we'll have the total view count be at the 2022 population numbers of some of Latin America's biggest cities like Mexico City or São Paulo.
Well, when I actually focus on improving traffic, perhaps that day will come sooner.
As a side note, what type of town name is "Muy Muy" as we see with Nicaragua.
"Muy Muy" is your town name?
Muy Muy what?
Muy Muy Gay?
To the good people of "Muy Muy, Nicaragua," here's the ice for that burn.
Dog getting ice out of fridge
I'm sure it's a cool town though.
According to their Wikipedia here, it apparently comes from "the indigenous group native to their area" and how "in their native language muimui translates to the best."
Or how it also translates to "otter" in some other language known as nawat where supposedly a lot of otter were once common in the area.
Slightly interesting Latin American facts for you all.
Going Forward
As always, this is my little "going forward" section for how I see the website progressing.
In this next year, I'll try to publish another 300 articles but no promises!
I'll be busy primarily with 3 things:
1. Spending some odd days here and there walking around every neighborhood I can find in Mexico City where I'll probably be outside for 7 to 8 hours per day when I do that.
2. Uploading those articles with all the photos of those neighborhoods can really be more time intensive due to the amount of photos I'll have.
3. I'll probably spend this year editing all of the articles I've written to fix any random grammatical errors mostly. They won't be perfect but just do a brief edit of each one. I've been fixing to do that for a while. Maybe 3 a day? Shouldn't take too much time I think.
Regardless, if I can pull off another 300 articles this year, that'll at least keep me at my original pace of more or less 400 articles a year.
And 300 is less than what my actual output has been (440 actually).
So we'll see!
After this year is over, my plan for this website is to eventually start to promote it (SEO, guest posting, social media, etc) but only after I edit the articles to make them more concise.
At some point, I might expand into other media forms like Youtube, podcast, etc. But maybe not. Depends. Some of the things I say or talk about would maybe not be welcome on Youtube given what they demonetize and punish but we'll see. That's at least another 2 to 4 years into the future if I ever do that.
Anyway, thanks for reading for the last 2 years to the dozen or so loyal readers that have always been checking up on my website every so often.
Enjoy this song from Latin America to celebrate the two year anniversary.
LA TANGUITA ROJA - Oro Solido (Vintage Merengue)