Two Years of Rough Cut

Well, another year has passed and I’m still here. I’m sometimes surprised that I manage to keep up a regular schedule on this blog, adding at least one post a week, sometimes more.

Although I still don’t get much feedback on my posts, my readership seems to have grown slowly but steadily over the past two years – at least according to Google Analytics, which informs me that I have about 2000 unique visitors every month now. If I want to boost my ego, I check the stats from my web host: according to them (and who knows what the difference is between their algorithms and Google’s?), I had over 3800 unique visitors last month. Of course, a lot of those don’t stick around long, but some people seem to be reading!

One of the most enjoyable parts of having this blog (and the website itself) has been receiving unexpected messages from interesting people – like a comment from the granddaughter of Commander Charles Lightoller, second officer of the Titanic, after I posted about A Night To Remember and my own slight family connection with the story of the famous ship; and appreciative notes from filmmaker Christopher Monger (after I wrote about his early features) and Vincenzo Natali (about my own connection with his interest in David Lynch and Eraserhead).

Looking back over the past two years, I have to admit that doing straight disk reviews is my least favourite part of the “job” … I prefer just free-associating off something that catches my interest. Many of the reviews I’ve done have initially been published on Blogcritics; I signed up there for a couple of reasons – 1) to keep some pressure on myself to keep writing and 2) because I like to get free DVDs. Looking back over almost two dozen reviews for them, I can see that this has introduced me to a number of films and filmmakers who have been worth getting to know, and I’d only count a couple of disks as a waste of time.

Writing for this blog has definitely become a habit – I get edgy when I don’t have at least one or two posts scheduled to go on-line – so I’ll continue working on it, hoping that I occasionally say something that piques a reader’s interest.

Cheers,
George