10,000 hits

The blog is about to reach it's first 10,000 hits since a counter was set-up last January. That's an average of just over 1,000 hits per month and an annual total of around 14,000 hits. It's not brilliant but it's OK. It would be much better if it was 1,000 unique visitors per month, rather than the number of page views. But it still represents a lot of Computing teachers and lecturers.

In my recent update letters, I stated that I planned to phase out the letters and use this blog to let people know what is going on in the vocational team in SQA. It takes time to maintain blogs and e-groups and other web services, and doing this as well as writing letters means me and my team are doing double the work. The online channels of communication are pretty well established now and it seems a good time (with 2010 around the corner) to begin to use them to replace older means of communication.

I'm often told that "it's easy" in my area to get people to use online communications. It's not. I can't say I have found Computing teachers to be any more or less receptive to web services than other other subject area. Using this blog instead of letters (for updates) and using the Groupsite instead of phonecalls (for job opportunities) might hasten the migration from old to new.

If you don't already do so, you might want to use a newsreader to keep up to date with this blog (and others, including podcasts). I use Google Reader, which I can highly recommend, but there are others. It's very simple to add a "feed" to a reader. Once you add a few feeds you don't have to "hunt the blogs" any more since the blogs come to your reader. It makes keeping up to date with specific blogs of interest very simple. Most blogs have a link to their feeds somewhere on the page (often at the bottom - like this one). And most modern phones have newsreaders built-in so you can check updates on your mobile.

So, here's hoping that this time next year I am reporting 1,000 visitors per month to this blog.