Tags
awards, basenji blogs, dog blogs, grooming, meta, shedding, shiba blogs
This is what happens when you try to pet your Shiba with staticky gloves in the middle of a coat blow…
So WordPress wanted me to publish my annual stats last year, but I didn’t think it was worth reporting after only five months worth of entries and 8000 hits. Now, another year and 45K hits later, some navel-gazing seems more justified. This also allows us to give thanks all around.
I don’t really like the template provided by WordPress, so I’ll summarize here:
Our top 5 referrers, in order:
- The Misadventures of a Shiba Inu, or the tell-all tales of two resident Shibas, Loki & Juju
- The BRAT blog, an exemplary nation-wide (+ Canada), breed-specific rescue network that joins pet owners, breeders, and Basenji lovers alike
- Our Shibal Inu, the best collection of Shiba comics on the net!
- Inu Baka, a charismatic group of dogs and people that I’ve enjoyed getting to know
- Demon Dog Sports, where Prince Zuko reports on life from the other side of the Bay
Most active commenters this year:
- Jen from Inu Baka leads this chart! She sure knows how to make new dog bloggers feel welcome.
- Losech from The Adventures of Conker has been running steady with a very active blog of her own, too.
- Ting from Shio the Shiba’s Blog (now with mooore Emi!) pops in every now and then to leave a whole flurry of comments, like the blogger equivalent of a Shiba/Basenji 500.
- Vicky, one of our most active commenters without a blog (unless she has an undisclosed one stowed away somewhere…)
- Adam from The Dogs of San Francisco, another fun local blog that adds personality and charm to this bustling Bay Area that we both call home
The rest of the stats aren’t that exciting. But another cool 2011 blog event was when Mac and “PupChow” nominated us for a Liebster Award. Woohoo! Thanks guys! We’ve been slow about passing it along…
Apparently the terms of acceptance are as follows:
- Thank your Liebster Blog Award presenter on your blog.
- Link back to the blogger who awarded you.
- Give your top 5 picks for the award.
- Inform your top 5 by leaving a comment on their blog.
- Post the award on your blog.
While [unsuccessfully] crawling the Internet for the origin of this award, I read elsewhere that one is supposed to nominate blogs with a readership of 200 or less. I tend to naturally gravitate towards the “small time” blogs (and I mean that in a good way), so this stipulation does nothing to winnow down my pool of nominees. I’m also never sure who’s willing to pass these things along (and I’m not offended if you don’t), and who regards them as a gimmicky nuisance… So in the spirit of discovery and starting off the new year by paying it forward, I pass this award to the following:
Hinoki the Shiba Inu, one of the latest blogs to storm the Shiba scene, with lots of great pictures to boot!
Dog Newbie (中文), breaking down linguistic borders. This blogger really knows her dogs, and is extremely active in training and dog sports — yet she still finds time to translate and compose original entries about the science of positive training in Chinese.
Musings of a Biologist and Dog Lover, who coherently and affably blends her studies of science and pets. Her regular features including Mismark Case Studies, Guess the Genotype, Unusual Breeds, and more are very educational.
Shiba Pursuit, an artistic couple with their adorable Shiba puppy, Kuma.
Junk Thief, who typifies what I think of “Basenji people” in the best possible way. The blog is not entirely about his pair of BRAT rescues, Shaka and Audrey, but the worlds he creates through his madly eclectic art should be more than enough to draw you in.
Junk Thief said:
Thanks for the mention and praise. I’ll gladly accept the “madly eclectic” description. It certainly beats “madly insane”.
ting said:
Ahhhh haha! So busted for my commenting 500 sprints.
I can’t wait to see what you and the bows have in store for us for the new year!
ting said:
Also, I was drawn in by the header of your entry for today. I had that sound in my head during the afternoon before we left to visit my Uncle in the hospital. Great spin on the song title.
M.C. said:
Hehe. I don’t actually like Kansas at all, but I do have a weakness for sentimental acoustic folk.
Adam Lang said:
Hah. Awesome. Who are your favorites?
M.C. said:
Hmm, well according to my Last.fm, I guess The Mountain Goats (surely that counts?), Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (hmm, we might have to drop that ‘sentimental’ descriptor), Fairport Convention (and that ‘acoustic’ part as well), Johnny Cash & Carter Family stuff, T.C. Yang (Taiwanese political folk artist who saw herself very much in the tradition of Joan Baez), Brigitte Fontaine (more like psyche-folk?), Vashti Bunyan (I’m surprised how far down she is on my charts!!)…
I do like exploring the old-timey and no-name or family name stuff as well. I love the archival wealth of [Smithsonian] Folkways, Rounder, Arhoolie… I guess we don’t have too much of it around this house on CD, so it doesn’t get logged into my last.fm.
Adam Lang said:
Cool! Autumn’s got a lot of the old Smithsonian folkways recordings. I am into that sort of more traditional stuff too (Bok, Muir, and Trickett, for example, or Steve Gillette and Cindy Mangsten), as well as some of the folky-rocky sort of stuff from the 60s (Crosby Stills & Nash, and especially Al Stewart, although I think I like his recent stuff even more). I’ll have to check out some of the groups you list, since aside from Fairport Convention, Johnny Cash, and the Carter Family, I haven’t run across any of them before.
Dave said:
Oh, M.C., I sure hope the Bows had a good 2011 and many good years to come.
Congrats on the 45,000 hits though.
M.C. said:
Thanks Dave. To you and Riley, too.
So when do you want to contribute a guest film post? =)
We’ve run into a couple Vallhunds recently, BTW. I’ll get a nice pic to show off one of these days.
Adam Lang said:
Aww, shucks. Charm! I’ll do my best to live up to that in the coming year.
And I definitely have to work on my engagement, I think. My posts tend to be pretty uncontroversial, true, but still, you get around the same number of page views as I do (plus or minus a bit… I’ve only really been tracking mine since May) but you get around an order of magnitude more comments. You’re my top commenter by a long shot. So thanks! It really does make a difference to know someone is paying attention.
M.C. said:
Honestly, I think it’s fine to be “uncontroversial.” I eschew polemics myself, though there are obviously some things that I get hopped up about, and many things that I care enough to explore deeper… with or without audience engagement. Luckily for me, the community of Shiba bloggers is a pretty supportive group. We all kind of chatter away on each other’s blogs. =)
I get a lot of hits from people just searching for various breeds, so I wonder if you have that going for you too. As you’ve noted before, there is a great diversity of breeds and mixes in this area!
Vicky said:
Thanks for the mention! I haven’t been communicating at all in the last several months; guess I’d better get On The Ball!
Vicky said:
Oops, I forgot to add (really! not just trying to boost my comment ‘count’) I don’t have a blog. I’m waaaaay too scared. Although I do have at least one opinion on ‘most everything, not always fact based…
Steph said:
Thank you so much for the mention! I very much appreciate your kind words.
I will definitely be passing this along as soon as I can think of who I would like to feature. It’s going to be so difficult to decide!