20,000 Comments Received on My Blog! A look back, hopefully in a non-self-promotional way

I hit an unusual milestone tonight, and I felt like writing a post about it. As you may already know, I can pretty much write a post about anything (or nothing). I watched lately as the comment number crept up slowly, even at a glacial pace this past week as it approached and finally passed the 20,000 mark.


I started wondering today who my very first comment was from when I started here, almost one year ago. My first two posts were super-boring and received no comments at all, but my third post garnered six comments (two were from me responding). The post was writtten on August 5th, 2007, and it was a question about whether it made a difference whether or not my client paid the extra annual payment toward principal all at once or in equal installments each month.


My first comment on ActiveRain was from Lorinda Ward, who was equally curious to know the answer. Not surprisingly, since it was a financing question, Jeff Belonger provided the most solid answer to the question I posed back then.


Sadly in retrospect, the question came up as a result of my friend David Wilder's closing on his new home with his wife Jan. As many of you already know, David passed away in late March after a battle with throat and neck cancer, and I still miss him terribly sometimes. If you are newer to AR or to my blog, you can read the whole story here: David Wilder (1958-2008) - See You Again Someday, My Friend.


Sorry to digress...


Tonight, I told Jeremy Blanton that he was going to be included in a post of mine, and I am a man of my word. Jeremy provided Comment # 20,000 on this record-setting post of mine, which now has over 1600 comments of its own: How to Get Over 100 Comments on Your Blog Posts - A Retrospective.


If you know me very well, you know that I am sort of a minor-league math geek, so I can't help checking some of the data at this point. With 20,015 comments as of this moment, and 511 posts, I am averaging just over 39 comments per post. However, I think it is more statistically relevant to remove the 1600 comment post completely, which puts the actual average at 36 comments. I was actually expecting a bigger difference. Thanks for watching me perform these thrilling, high-speed calculations. :-)


So, I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to comment on my blog to this point.


As a small side note, I am approaching 700 subscribers now (688), and I would like to thank the first ten people who subscribed to my blog when I was a brand-new blogger. Thanks for taking a chance on me when I was pretty much still an unknown commodity, and for sticking with me since then. Seeing that others cared enough about my writing to subscribe to my blog was highly encouraging, and it motivated me to continue.


Under the new sorting system for subscribers, if someone unsubscribes, they would not appear at the beginning of the list, so these folks are loyal, too!


My first ten subscribers (in order) were these brave souls:



Residential Real Estate > Nestor N. Romero, REALTOR®.
Nestor N Romero - Homes in Fairfield County , Connecticut



Tom Burris | Texas Home Loan Expert
Texas Home Loan Blog



Brian Myers ~ Scottsdale & Paradise Valley, AZ Real Estate Agent
Brian Myers ~ Scottsdale &'s Blog



Gary Miljour - Mortgage Lending for Tempe Arizona
Gary Miljour's Blog: Mortgage Lending for Tempe Arizona



Ginger Wilcox, Marin County Realtor
Ginger's Marin County Real Estate Blog



Shane Sarae, Senior Mortgage Planner
Shane's Blog



Sarah Cooper
Sarah's Hurricane, WV Real Estate Blog



Brad Andersohn ~ Community Builder
Active Brads Blog



Bryant Tutas Broker/REALTOR(R) Tutas Towne Realty, Inc
Broker Bryant's Real Estate Ramblings



Shannon Lefevre Naples, Florida CRS
Shannon Lefevre - Naples, Florida Real Estate Insights


Some of these people have disappeared from ActiveRain since then, and a couple of them have become close friends of mine. One of them went on to join the AR staff, and one of them has more comments than I do. An interesting list, in my opinion.

Overall, writing this post has reminded me of one of my favorite Beatles songs. Enjoy:



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