Celebrating Four Years of The Mid-South Retail Blog!

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! Not the most typical holiday for someone to tell you to have a good one of, of course, but by now you probably know that here at the MSRB, this day holds a special significance as marking the blog's anniversary. Specifically, as of today, the Mid-South Retail Blog is officially four years old, and as a result the remainder of 2019 will mark our fifth year on the web. I've had a great time running this blog so far, and greatly appreciate your readership. So as always - thank you!

The blog's statistics have not varied too awful much over the past couple of years, actually, but I'll still list them below, just in keeping with tradition. Also, I'm writing this post a week or so before you're actually seeing it, so a few of the numbers might be slightly off from the exact figures as they stand on March 17th, 2019. But for the most part, they should be in the same ballpark at least.

Our all-time pageviews counter stands at 76,296 as I'm writing this (EDIT: and 76,616 on March 17th), compared to last year's 60,862. Pageviews have been hovering somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 every month, which is pretty steady. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if Blogger counts my own visits to the site as pageviews; if so, I'm probably to blame for most of those :P

The blog's top five posts by pageviews are the exact same as last year, so instead of listing all of those out again, I'll just direct you to last year's post here. It doesn't seem likely that any new post will ever be able to overtake those statistics, which is a bit unfortunate, because I like to think that my writing style has improved since that time, and my posts have become a bit more in-depth with copious amounts of research to support several of my more extensive essays. But I digress.

The blog continues to accept contributions from readers at midsouthretailblog [at] gmail [dot] com. Over this past year we featured a record number of contributor posts, ranging from a press release I received in my inbox (strangely enough!), to entries by two new authors, to the return of our very own l_dawg2000. I'm always happy to share content that you readers come up with, so please, keep your submissions coming! And on that note... if you also have any comments, concerns, or suggestions, please send me those as well. I always welcome feedback regarding the blog.

New to the blog over the past year have been several changes to our sidebar, visible on the right side of your screen if you're viewing the desktop version of our site; these include edits to our welcome page, the addition of easy access buttons to collections of our various series (such as Lost Histories), and a slew of new contenders to our ever-growing list of recommended retail blogs, many of which were fueled by flickr's decision to limit free accounts to 1,000 uploads. Personally, I'm still over on flickr, so feel free to continue to check me out there; and of course, I plan on continuing to bring lots of new content to y'all here on the blog as well, including this coming weekend if all goes as planned (!), so be sure to stick around for that.

Again, I sincerely value your patronage. Thank you for four great years so far - I'm excited for the next four, and hopefully more! Until next time, as always, have fun exploring the retail world wherever you are :)

Retail Retell