You and Me Tag || The Blogger with a Recorder

Her forehead still bears proof of the overload of vermilion dumped on it on her marriage day. Her hands jingle with the sound of the conch shell bangles they put on the same day. Her always-bare hands are suddenly full of marriage jewelry. At times she still gazes at her hands and wonders if it all really happened.

The beach air is lusty on her face, playing havoc with her hair. The waves are lapping at the shore. Vacationers, foreigners in bikini, roam about, laze about on the white sands. She looks ahead to her husband, who seems busy in building a sand castle in the distance. She smiles at his dedication.

The stranger sits a few feet next to her. He is wearing a flower-print shirt and military green shorts. He has a small device in his hands. He switches it on and lays it on the sand. He then looks far ahead into the sea, a look of content in his face.

“Hey, you!” She calls out.

The stranger looks at her. “Hey, yourself!”

“Don’t mind my asking, but what are you doing?” pointing at the device.

The stranger gives a short laugh and walks over to her, picking up the device.

“It is a recorder. I am recording the sound of the waves. It relaxes me.” He holds the small, black thing out to her.

She holds it in her hand, presses the little red button and the sound of the waves start spilling, only barely audible above the growl of the actual waves.

“Wow! It’s amazing how the waves tone out every other noise. Is this a hobby or something?” She asks.

“Well, sort of! I use the sound for my website too. I am a blogger.”

“Ah! Well, I am one too… or rather, I used to be. Don’t get much time these days. I knew someone who used wave-sounds in his website as well.”

“Oh, you did? The waves are fascinating. And calming. It is a significant part of us who live by the shores.” The stranger extended his hands, “I am Savio. And you are?”

She met his hands, “Arpita here. But wait, you’re Savio? I think I followed your blog! The extra mile or something… with a lot of a’s?”

Savio beamed. “You bet it is! Wow, it’s great to meet you, Arpita! How’s your vacation goin so far?”

“Honeymoon, actually. Goa’s lovely!” she smiles a shy smile. She points at her husband, who has now completed building the castle and is busy taking pictures of it. “That’s my husband.”

Savio gets up and gestures her to do the same. Arpita follows. “Well, let’s get to know each other then,” he says as he starts to walk towards her husband. “I am happy to be your  local guide too, if you’d like.”

“Yes, of course. We’d love that,” She smiles. In her mind, she thinks, “What a small world!”

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Inspired by the You and Me Tag post on Savio’s blog.

@Savio – I mostly read all the followed blog-posts on the reader itself, so I had no idea how absolutely refreshing your blog theme is. And the wave sound part was amazing – I had no clue you could add sounds to blogs. I literally finished writing this blog-post to the sound of the waves. Hope you enjoy reading it!

Copyright © 2017, Arpita Pramanick

Dear WordPress blogger, what do your search terms say?

Dear blogger,

Have you ever looked at what the search terms on your WordPress blog say?

I have a weird fascination of checking out search terms. I keep going back to the Stats page of my blog, and look at which search terms led viewers to my blog.

This morning, armed with my knowledge of Python, I decided to draw some insights from the search terms. What are the items that are most searched to reach my blog? What does a certain search lead viewers to my blog? These are questions that would help me understand my blog traffic better, and hence plan my blog posts better.

So, I wrote a little code to segregate my search terms and check the frequency of each. Here’s an overview of each:

I find it interesting that most people have reached my blog by doing a search which contained the search term ‘magazine’ or ‘publish’ or ‘short story’. This leads me to believe that my old post about magazines to publish fiction and nonfiction is India is still relevant. I’m glad!

When people are searching for my blog, many search ‘scribbles @ arpita’ as well, so that resulted in a few search terms containing my name. But there were a few really weird search items too, like the one highlighted in the picture below:

Hand-cutting? Blood? OMG, what was the viewer looking for?

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of understanding viewer motivations. As you all probably know from an earlier post on my other blog, I love using the skills learnt in office to my day-to-day life. I’m glad I’m finding more and more interesting problems in my real life that I can solve using my newly acquired skills.

Enough about me. Now, to you – have you ever looked at your search terms before? If not, please do. Maybe you’ll note some interesting trends in data, which will lead to to write more reader-oriented posts!