One year of Bat Blogging!

The Bat Page is now one!

I don't have an astounding article to share, or a web site face lift, or anything else 'major'. I thought I'd just reflect on what has been an interesting year. Along the way I learned a lot about blogging, made connections, found new some great resources, made new friends, and wrote a few good articles.

I started this blog along with a blog for the 443rd Scouts so I could write about Scouting related and side interests that might not be of interest to all of the families in our group. It began with a few ideas that would support badgework, scoutcraft, and getting in touch with other Scout groups (see Scoutblogs and Scoutreach). And I thought I had some topics might have some interest and be of use to Scouting like groups and perhaps some others.

Just a few days ago the Bat Page recorded its 20,000th visitor ( in just 9 months of tracking). That's far more than I expected when I started this. Wow! Not bad for a Scouters blog.

The chart above shows those visits. The spikes from left to right are:

• Carnival of Space #61: Tunguska Edition,
• Scam psychology, Whack-a-mole and the next 2012 hoax,
• Greenwash, Security Theatre, and Skepticism - Critical Thinking, and
• Astronomical distances are .... (well) astronomical.

Back in May I wrote Mang's Most Popular. This was before the spikes generated by The Carnival of Space and Stumblers. There is still steady interest in articles like:

• Build your own Planisphere (Star Finder)!, and
• Navigation without a compass (or GPS).

One things I tried to do with the last two articles, was to make sure they provided answers for those in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

The Web and tools like blogs have the potential to transform and expand Scouting. Events like JOTI are a fantastic complement to traditional jamborees. The promise of Scoutblogs is to keep this kind of grass-roots communication going all the time. There are great examples of Scout Bloggers, but I think there is room for a lot more. I know Scouters that have a wealth of relevant and useful information covering all of the domains of Scouting knowledge. More of them need to share this. Scouters could take a lesson from the Space/Astronomy blogging community that has shown one way it can be done.

There are a lot of people who've shown how to do it and I'd like to thank some of them: Scouters Joy, Ken, and Clarke; and Space bloggers Fraser, Ian, and Phil.