Top Ten???

Oh my gosh - my other (http://bythesea.deardiary.net/) online diary is on the top ten on their homepage.

What???!!!

I just happened to go to the Home page because I was going to poke around for a couple diaries to read by genre and I noticed my diary was listed on the top ten list.

Holy Cow! I had to do a double-take. How did that happen?

I'm not sure I really want to be in the top ten, I think I kind of prefer being a little more anonymous, stealthy, incognito. I've never been in the top ten before so I'm sure I'll drop off soon.

I think I know what might have happened.

Saturday I ran across a couple of posts on an e-group by some folks in discernment about ordination, priesthood, etc. They were looking for book ideas and had some questions, etc. Something about that and some recent events lead me to decide to go look back at some entries when I was where they are now. I can pretty much tell you what it was like, it wasn't all that long ago, but there's something about reading the exact thoughts and words that you wrote.

I started that online diary for two reasons: 1) to work through my own process (as well as journal on other misc. stuff), and 2) to keep a record so that I could go back and remember what it was like when I encounter people going through it - and with half an idea to use those entries to write about it someday, maybe a book or something. I didn't know, I just knew I wanted to process stuff and it might be helpful to others if I could go back and look at what it was like for me, and maybe give them access to it.

So I went back looking for a few specific entries - like my very first post. Well once I started, I kind of got on a roll and ended up spending hours looking through a lot of entries. I had some ideas of specific months and approximate dates to look for relevant entries, but I still had to scroll through quite a few. I think viewing all those entries (and I copied and saved the specific url's the date, and the name of my entry into a Word doc for my future reference) resulted in showing up as "hits" to my diary.

So I think it looked like I was getting a lot of traffic, when really it was just me reviewing my life, my thoughts, etc.

It was actually pretty interesting and illuminating and I'm planning a post on what I learned in looking back at those entries, but I'm too tired right now.

Maybe in the next few days.