1000

After almost five years of blogging, I have reached the magic number of 1000 posts. When I started with this blog, I never expected that I would have enough topics to write about to fill such a big number of postings, or have the patience to keep up with writing up something regularly over such a long time. Though I recently haven't been posting as often as I did in the beginning, when I had five postings a week, this is not because I have run out of topics or out of steam. One reason is that there are not many news on changes in the subdivisions - the Mae Sot act is still on the agenda of the parliament, there's still just one new district in the planning and no concrete developments on that one either, so its mostly just the status changes of the local government units which are taking place. And I somehow take much more time nowadays for the research before having an article ready for posting, no wonder since the simple topics have been dealt with here already. But after a bit of vacation time, I now have several new things to post soon...

When looking at the access statistics of this blog, I see a slow but steady increase with now about 1000 hits a month. Nothing impressive compared with other blogs or websites, but given the special topic of the blog it is more than I expected. And though I had some interesting feedback from readers over the years, I still would love to read more comments or questions, just to get an idea if I am writing something which isn't just for myself. My main hope and original reason to start blogging hasn't yet materialized - getting into contact with someone within the Thai administrative system, to get more insight or have someone to send my questions, suggestions etc. Almost all attempts to contact anyone directly have failed so far.

Looking at the most popular postings, by far the most popular one was my analysis of the board game "King of Siam", whether the country divisions used in that game set at the times of King Chulalongkorn have any valid background. Even more marginally related to the main topic of the blog is second popular posting on road signs. Those postings most relevant to me or the topic and probably of most use for any researcher stumbling on this blog are in the long tail of less often accessed postings.

Though I doubt I will be able to reach the second thousand postings in a similar amount of time like for the first thousand, I will certainly continue to write about noteworthy news or interesting background articles, and continue to give status reports on my data collection project. But as mentioned - don't hesitate to give me feedback, knowing that I do something which gets noticed and used is the best motivation to continue working on it.