A Million Thanks

At long last.

I started this blog and named it Viable Opposition largely because I live in a two political party jurisdiction where we badly need a viable third party option.  It was a way for me to vent my feelings, lower my blood pressure and, hopefully, get a few people thinking before they take the time to vote.  I began by dealing with local issues and quite quickly learned that it was akin to crapping in your own backyard so, I changed my focus to national issues.  While that was fun, there was a huge international audience out there and, as Europe's crisis began to wind up and BP fouled the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I thought it would be interesting to learn about issues that were out of my comfort zone and deal with some that I knew something about.  In July 2010, I began to write about international issues that were either not as heavily covered by the mainstream media or where I thought that my knowledge as a scientist would offer a different and perhaps deeper investigation.  As those of you that read my musings regularly know, I very, very rarely quote from media sources, rather, I head right to the source material.  I guess it's my science training; I strive to be as error-free as possible.  As I spend time viewing the online versions of newspapers around the globe, I have found it interesting to see how little original writing there is out there; most of what we read in our local newspapers is sourced from a handful of writers around the English-speaking world.  This means that we, as consumers of news, are hardly getting an unbiased and original viewpoint.

Since I started this blog two and a half years ago, I have set goals for myself as a way to stay motivated.  As many bloggers know (right MP?), motivation is difficult for those of us with non-commercial blogs.  Yes, I do have Google Ads but the income from those click throughs basically pays for the electricity that I use to keep my computer monitor lit so that's hardly enough to keep a blogger motivated.  When I first started out, I was trying to post something every day.  That didn't last; it was just taking up way too much of my day and, other than friends who I basically begged to read my musings, I was getting very few hits.  My next goal was to achieve the 5000 page hit target.  Next up was the magic one hundred hits a day; that first happened during the G-20 Summit held in Canada during late June 2010.  It was a weird experience watching my counter rise past my usual 25 to 30 hits per day and, quite frankly, a bit creepy.  By Christmas 2010, I'd hit the 100,000 hit mark, a personal blogging watershed moment.  As time went on, I kept thinking that it would be great to get 250,000 hits then 500,000 and so on.

Last night, my Google page hit counter looked like this:

Finally, I have reached my goal.  There were days went it seemed like it would never happen.

In case you are interested, this is where most of my page hits came from:

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has clicked on my blog deliberately or inadvertently, those who have taken the time to post a comment because, after all, this endeavour is about creating dialogue and getting people to think, those who have added their names to my Followers list and those who have clicked on a Google Ad.  My sincere hope is that you have all learned something.  I know that I have.  While I haven't met any of you and don't always respond to your comments, I read every one of them and respect your opinions, whether we agree or not.

Thanks again for your support.  It is humbling.