In 2013, six years ago this past week, I created Riverside Peace but after a month of setting up the blog and posting a few test posts, my password wouldn’t work. I tried for months to retrieve it before I finally gave up. We had just moved into a sad little house that need a lot of our time renovating. That took almost eighteen months to complete. My aging father was living with us too, so blogging was the furthest thought from my mind.
Fifteen months ago, on a whim, I tried the very original password I had used back when I first set up the blog. To my surprised I was in!
The first thing I did was delete every single follower with the exception of a very dear friend. Then, I recreated the blog and shortly after I updated to the cheapest plan, mostly to get rid of those annoying ads. Interesting enough, “On a Whim’ was the only free design at the time and it was perfect. By then I had a handful of loyal followers; in return, I followed them.
In just over twelve months I had established a following just under 500 and I followed around 200 bloggers. Not very loyal, was I?
In April this year I decided to spend much of my online time looking through blogs of those who have followed me since April 2018 and of those I had followed during that time. To my surprise I discovered the following:
- 6 followers had deleted their blogs (some of these I had been following)
- 3 were sex worker sites
- 5 were bloggers who sell stuff
- 7 hadn’t posted for almost a year
I deleted all 21 followers and to my disbelief only one returned. He is a blogger that sells stuff but he turned out to be also a true follower. I actually deleted him twice before he sent me a message that he really like reading my posts. Sorry. We chatted back and forth and I agreed to leave him as a follower, if he wasn’t offended if I didn’t follow him. This he agreed to and promised to at least leave a ‘like’ when he dropped by. He still does and from time to time he leaves a comment. I now follow him but just through Reader.
By deleting the other twenty followers, it had obviously dropped the overall number of bloggers who follow me. I thought I would never get to 500. June was the slowest month of new followers with only one or two new followers a week.
I have now also viewed all but the few recent follower blogs and increased the number of bloggers I follow. Please don’t be offended if I have not viewed your blog or decided not to follow for a various reasons. The main reason is that some whole blogs are vacant of any English and I have no idea what their blog is about.
Thank you to all my loyal followers for putting up with me.
Chrissy
