100th Post: Evolution of Blog

I started this blog last December, with the intention of having it fill the same roll my other travel websites have filled while I was away from home; as a way to keep in touch with family and friends back home. At first that is exactly what it was, and it never occurred to me that other people might actually be interested in some of this. Slowly I kept seeing an increase in traffic and Kim made some changes to the format and added some links via other expat sites and the traffic increased even more. I even ended up doing some travel writing thanks to an editor coming across my blog, and have since had some other opportunities thanks to readers.

So while I have supplied the writing content on this blog, and the pictures that scroll on the sidebar are mine, I have to give full credit to Kim for really adding the aesthetics and the marketing that  has opened this blog up to a wider audience. After some more changes recently to how posts are labeled and another page layout change recently views on this page are up some 40%. While I'm not getting thousands of views a day like some websites, we'll most likely get about 400 unique views this week from increasingly diverse parts of the planet. So I owe Kim a big thanks for most of this blogs transformation. Someone might wonder what exactly this is transforming into, and that is the purpose of this post.

While I still fully plan on having the occasional opinion piece or a post where I talk about stuff I'm doing in Nepal, I'm also focusing on turning the site into more of a resource for people that plan on spending time in Nepal. The post content won't change dramatically, but I plan on having more reviews of different services from trekking outfits to restaurants as well as adding a better organization of information so that if people are interested in information about the Annapurna circuit for instance they can find it a little easier. I plan on fully expanding that list of restaurants and helpful websites on the side bar as well as creating additional pages that will contain information on different treks or what there is to do in Kathmandu, Pokhara or other locations. I have also noticed that I get a lot of referral trafic from other bloggers that discuss Nepal, and I'll start a sidebar that links back to other Nepal blogs as well. Eventually I would like this to be a fairly central information center to all things Nepal. This won't happen over night, but slowly this is more the direction that the blog is headed to.

At its heart though, this blog is about an American living in Nepal, what happens here and my perspective on it. That's what it will always be most likely. The new things that are being added are to be a resource for people who are travelling to this place I love so much in order that they can get as much out of their time here as possible. Nepal can be a notoriously hard place to find accurate information about what is going on, where stuff is or how things work. I mean this is a country that doesn't have something like a phone book or yellow pages, it's not navigated in the same way as back home. Internet resources are often biased, dated, or both. I'm hoping to kind of fill the gap of lack of good up to date information for what goes on here.

Lastly thanks a bunch to the people who have been reading consistently. I see a lot of repeat traffic and it's great to hear from people who enjoy reading about Nepal and my small place in it. If anyone ever has any questions that they are having trouble answering about something over here, always feel free to ask me via a comment on the blog or via an e-mail to me directly (Brian@harilo.com). So thanks for reading and hopefully this blog can continue to improve over the next hundred posts!