Happy Birthday

Tomorrow this blog will be one year old. It was originally setup in advance of the SNP’s conference in Perth in 2006. Within that year the political landscape in Scotland has changed markedly and, if it’s escaped your attention, the SNP are now the minority Government in Scotland.

As time has progressed I`ve tried to develop the blog to make it a bit better to read and to look at. During the year there seems to have been an explosion of new blogs and at a similar time to the start of this blog there was the very welcome addition of the Scottish Blogging Round-up.

Since I added a statscounter in January I can tell you that since then this blog has had 16,024 page views - 11,375 unique visitors – and 4,615 returning visitors. At the moment its about 1,200 unique visitors a month.

Blogging has also shown me the vagaries of search engines and the terms that have drawn people to the blog like moths to a flame. Among the more bizarre of these is the search term ‘Black Background’ – if you do a google image search the a picture on this blog is the second option. As such I`ve had lots of visitors in the past while who aren’t interested in Scottish Politics but who are really really keen on black backgrounds.

Others have been very kind about the blog and along with getting third place in the Holyrood gossip section in one assessment, thanks to Grant Thomas of Tartan Hero this blog is also listed in Iain Dales’ top 20 Scottish political blogs, and top 10 SNP blogs.

So happy birthday to the blog!