A Little History of Cootiehog

I’ve been running this blog since April 2002. That’s a LONG time! And in that time, Denis and I made 5,130 posts, enjoyed reading 12,004 comments, and have blocked 31,130 spam comments just since installing Akismet alone (who knows how many more got deleted or blocked from my pre-Wordpress days). For blogging platforms I’ve used Greymatter, Moveable Type and then once I got my hands on WordPress I swore I’d never leave. I LOVE WordPress.

I clicked into my site stats. It’s amazing the drop in visitors since I joined Facebook. Pre-Facebook I was getting 10,000 unique visitors a month to this site. For a small blog that never promotes itself, that’s pretty good. But this site went down to an average of 2,500 monthly visitors the month I joined Facebook! The reason? I went from posting 3-4 times a day to posting once a day, to posting a couple times a week, to sometimes going 1-2 weeks between posts. No wonder people left in droves!

I think I now have about a dozen faithful readers – down from about a hundred faithful daily readers that I had pre-Facebook. I’m okay with that. I’m not doing this so that I can get attention (although remember when my blog was featured on CNN?). What fascinates me now is what brings STRANGERS to my blog.

Since the blog began, here are the top search terms that bring strangers to Cootiehog:

neil diamond christian 2,756
indiana jones birthday cake 2,543
david cook kimberly caldwell 2,123
i’ve been booed 1,784
nikki mckibben 1,015
deanna pappas 756
mark spitz interview 677
weight loss spreadsheet 542
la vencedora vanilla 534
redbox codes 263
i love anderson cooper 204

And there’s more. Stuff like jello shooter recipes, novalis kitchen floor tiles, and the Barilla pasta guy. Seeing all those search terms brings to mind the exact posts that I made that resulted in those search terms being so “valuable” to this site (not valuable money-wise, but in terms of being found through searches online).

Neil Diamond singing on American Idol and leading me to think he may be a Christian.

Discovering who the Barilla pasta guy was and putting him on the Fake Boyfriend list.

It was strictly by accident that I was watching TV Guide channel and saw David Cook ask Kimberly Caldwell out to dinner on live TV – people STILL search for that video clip and end up on Cootiehog.

Lots of people search for the Indiana Jones birthday cake and end up finding my half storebought, half homemade decorated cake.

Good times. I’ll be honest – occasionally I think it’s time to shut down the blog. Especially when I get really bad about posting regularly because I’m caught up on Facebook. But I’m glad it has stuck around – if only as a diary of the past 9 years of our lives. I’ll admit – I like clicking through the posts that are listed below more current ones. For instance, after posting the floorplans the other day, I clicked through the recommended posts and found floorplans I had posted a couple years ago. It’s hard to believe the same person that said a couple days ago that 2300-2600 sq ft would be perfect is the same person who two years ago felt that 4000 was more appropriate for our family. What was I THINKING? I can’t even take care of 2800 square feet properly! *lol*

And we still have the kids’ blogs, even though they NEVER get updated. At this point we’re holding them in case the kids decide to take over with them when they get older. What are the odds CB will want “Scratch Mittens?” *lol* I’d say none, but we hold the domain nonetheless. Because you never know.

So yeah, Cootiehog will be around for a while. I’m not done yet.