Happy 10K Views! 🎉

From Wikimedia Commons. By Prodego.
Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

10,000. This number is too little in today's social media standards for an all-time viewership, but I am going to celebrate this small win anyway.

Most especially now in the mid-2020s (I know, we're in the middle of this decade), peeple are fonder of contents that they can watch, funny videos or anything with animated visuals, regardless of if they are real or generated by AI.

Words, if they do not compose stories that are not too luring enough, will not win a wide array of audiences, unless I'll do clickbaiting... No, I will not do that.

So, blogs that do not contain eye-catching or intriguing content such as this will never stand a chance at getting 10,000 views in record time.

Well, I have two old blogs; I do not post on them for years now in favor of just updating this very site. Those two blogs have had more than 50,000 combined views in twelve to thirteen years. And I think the first blog reached the 10,000-view milestone in 4.5 years, a few weeks less than what the Joezone Layer blog had achieved since I started writing on this in 2021.

Comparison of all-time page views of my first blog and this newest blog. Note the difference in the primary OS peeple use. Mobile has now become mainstream even for blogs.

So yeah, 10K views for this blog at this day and age? Should not be too bad. I should give myself some pats on the back.

BEYOND BLOGS. I tried connecting with more peeple through webcasting in 2013 and had moved to several platforms in a span of nine years: Freedocast, Justin.tv (now Twitch), YouTube and the latest was in Discord doing two "seasons" of Joe's Audio Show. Only a handful of peeps know or even remember I did this because... hmm yeah why peeple would?

My old Facebook cover photo announcing the timeslots of my webcast on Freedocast in March 2013.

I gave up that scene. I had fun doing it despite requiring long months of conceptualization and many revamps but making it relevant to everyone was not easy. All my efforts putting them up and sustaining them were all vanities. God does not want me doing these things apparently.

It is only this blogging hobby I can't seem to surrender.

This is in spite of the page views of individual posts; they are not phenomenal.

FROM 'VIEWS!' TO 'OKAY, VIEWS.' In my early days of blogging, I cared about the stats and from which new country my blog was viewed from, but today... not much. One huge exception though, when the post about how my girlfriend and I met got way more views, I was astonished. That was record-breaking for me and it is still my most-viewed story on this blog to date. (Credits to my girlfriend for sharing that post, she was the catalyst.) Aside from that, the other posts were just waiting to be found or rediscovered.

Now, whenever I publish a new post, I am positive that my ever-supportive girlfriend, several good friends and some of my colleagues at work will be the first ones to read the latest entry, but beyond that, I honestly do not know. 

But I understand readers have their taste and freedom of preference. Blogs including mine may not always be in their palette, if not at all. Also, the blog posts reflect the literature of their author. Good authors would always produce good stories, on the other hand, boring ones make boring pieces of writing, in my case, this blog. I am aware of my deficiencies in storytelling and vocabulary, but I will work on them. I would like to think I lost many years that I could have spent honing my writing skills. As a young kid, I always wanted to compose stories, but I was not fully supported and was actually got reprimanded against creative writing as a personal hobby as I was told to focus on academics and nothing else. It was only when I was in China, having my independence and necessary tools to work with, that I began doing blogs. Too bad.

Now, maybe some of you are wondering why I am not posting in Filipino (Tagalog) language, using my native language could help pull some momentum. I shall be honest with you: I plan to monetize this blog soon, just like my older two. I attempted twice, but both got rejected by Google AdSense as this blog is yet to generate good viewership numbers. Content-wise, Google is really strict. Declaring this an English language blog will require me to use English in all of my posts. So, here you go. (For speakers of other languages, you guys can use the "Translate" option found on the right-side column for PCs and at the bottom part for mobile. Accuracy is not guaranteed but it can be helpful.)

And also, I do not want to gain views by just riding on some clout or by writing about what's trending all the time. I can definitely do that, but it would be exhausting as trending topics change by the hour these days. I want to be consistent with my values and my truth as well, so as not to compromise those, I will keep my prudence in maintaining my blog personal and genuine.

While 10K views is insignificant to many, however, gaining this much views in more than four years is one milestone I just can't let pass. I did not even dedicate time to write about this event in my older two blogs, so now's the good chance to appreciate the peeps who made this happen.

THANK YOU. To my readers, thank you so much for unconsciously and unknowingly showing kindness and patience from the other side of the screen. Kindness, for you are kind enough to lend a few minutes of your precious time; and forbearance for the grammar mistakes and storylines that perhaps do not meet your expectations.

I thank you for paying attention to what I say (or blabber) here. Whether or not you gained insights from a small number of what I published so far, I hope my sincerest gratitude reaches your way.

I wish I have a luxury of time so that I can post more often and share a bit of what I know and think about things. But even if I do have time, finding some inspiration on what to write next takes half the job. I do not want to let my blog be just a bunch of online rants composed out of impulse. Happy moments deserve space in here, too.

Despite the shortcomings and fewer materials to read, you guys still patronized my blog and made time to hear me out. For an introvert, that to me is priceless.

This blog is currently the only literary window to myself, and I welcome everyone to have a glimpse of who I am, even just having a peek would be fine. I do not regularly post on my socials since 2023, and most of these profiles are not available outside of my friends and followers. If you guys see my social media activities, those comments and reactions are just very little fragments. This blog will lead you to eventually knowing your not-so-average Joe.

No matter how much the digital world evolves or how irrelevant blogging becomes, I think in the long-term, I will still carry on.

EXTRA. May I share with you two candid points of "evolution."

I do my blog posting on Microsoft Edge, and it has grammar correction enabled here in Blogger. (A decade ago, browser-supported grammar checks were non-existent.) It helps most of the time, but of course, if you know you're right, don't just blindly follow the suggested corrections, such as this one:

My subject-verb agreement is still alive!

Joe: 1, Edge: 0

Then, when I viewed my all-time stats by country, nearly a quarter of those 10K views belongs to "Other." I don't remember seeing this in my older two blogs back in the day. Who are these? Are these bots? Martians?

If these were indeed bots, I still thank you guys (real humans) for the ~7,700 times you visited and read something on my blog. Maybe a thousand of these views of unknown origin really belong to the Martians, so I should thank them, too! (Hold on, Martians can read now?)

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MINI BLOG PLUG.

Got more time reading? You may want to explore more on this blog by reading these two about the author (Outer Layer and Inner Core), or by finding the all-time most popular posts at the bottom part of this page.

Also, you may want to leave some of your thoughts in the comment section below. You can post your comments whether anonymously or by using your Google account. Either way, all comments get moderated.

Thanks for dropping by, peeple!