Gentle reader, if you have at your disposal some way to forward a link to this web site to a kind soul in Ulan Bator, or anywhere else in the fine high country of Mongolia, please do so. Here’s why:
As of today, we’re six months into this experiment and reasonably happy with our progress. We’ve seen a steady growth in readers, so thank you. We’ve set aside our first fear, that there wouldn’t be enough content to draw on; to the contrary, it’s harder and harder to pick out what we’re going to cover. And every day makes us more convinced that we’re becoming a useful and enjoyable source of information.
So what’s the deal with Mongolia? One of the unexpected joys of running a web site is Google Analytics. This handy (and free) service tells us how many page views we’re getting from how many visitors, and where those visitors are from. (Be assured that it only gives us country- and sometimes city-specific data; regardless of what we’re told about how some sites know everything about their visitors, here at Recreati we can’t gather any personal information about who is visiting, so we can’t find out if old lovers are stalking us, which would produce at once a nostalgic chuckle and a queasy twitch.)
Almost every time we run a report—maybe twice a month—we’re delighted to see that we’ve added visitors from a couple of new countries. As of today, we’ve had folks from 48 nations, which is great and oddly humbling, and we like the way the report shows them on a map.
China. Indonesia. Turkey. Chile. Serbia.
We suspect that some of those visits aren’t from people who are over 50 and interested in the outdoors. We think they are robots, or at least computers that have been programmed to cruise endlessly through the great ocean of the internet, dropping comments that include a link to a site offering lady’s sunglasses or gas grill reviews, because somehow that increases the ranking of those sites on Google when a person searches for those products.
Who knew?
Anyway, we don’t care. We are irritated by the time needed to ding the comments, yes. But we still enjoy looking at the map with the same nerdish fascination that infects stamp collectors, and coin collectors, and builders of empires. We like acquiring new countries.
Moldova. Ghana. Pakistan. Netherlands Antilles.
So much real estate, but we are hungry for more. In particular, we want a reader from Mongolia. We have no good reason for this, except that Mongolia strikes us as a distant and romantic land. Having a reader there would give us a good reason to write something about outdoor activities in that place. And it would be an inspiring demonstration of how connected we are and blah blah blah. Look, we just want that stamp on our map. So give a brother a hand, OK?
One last note on making it to the six-month milestone: If you have ideas on how to improve, don’t hesitate to let us know. People say that all the time, and you may have noticed they don’t always mean it. We do. We also enjoy your non-critical comments and messages. And again, thanks.
Image: Rider boys at the well of Asgat sum (district), Sukhbaatar aimag, Mongólia, by Vadas Róbert (Vadaro) via Wikimedia Commons. If these young horsemen were ten in 1972, when this photo was taken, they are now part of the Recreati demographic.
