Comments By The Thousands

I recently discovered Blogger archives only the last one thousand reader comments. At present, that means I'm only able to re-read any comments made between when I began blogging in March 2011 and mid 2013 by scanning my earlier posts, one at a time.

Of course, that cap on the number of comments that can be easily viewed provided me with a neat, if solipsistic, rationalization for returning to those first several hundred posts. But solipsism aside, it was fun to recently read some of those early comments as well as to be reminded of the ebb and flow of this blog over almost eight years. A few early regular commenters still appear now and then; a few comment as frequently now as they did in 2011-2013. Others have stopped commenting publicly but write me offline. For some, the glitches in Blogger's comment feature discouraged them early on and even though much of that has since been fixed, they never tried again. The most intriguing part of this brief journey to the past was re-reading comments from 2011-2013 made by people unknown to me. I always wonder how those folks stumbled onto this blog. If their comment was a one-off occurrence, did they ever make their way back to the bell curve?  

Thank you to anyone who has ever taken the time to comment, even once. It would be hard to over-state the energy I get from your comments, even the crabby ones.