Why the facelift?

By "facelift", I mean the replacement of Centerpointe Communicator's original frontispiece with this one:

Centerpointe's iconic pine tree with a hint of tract home treasury in silhouette.

When I started this thing, I made a mental note to myself that I would mark the occasion of each additional block of ten thousand new blog hits with a bit of e-renovation.  The twenty-thousandth hit actually happened a couple of weeks ago but I just got around to the update yesterday. 

Now, of course, by internet standards, 20,000 viewers is not very much.  But I've intentionally tried to keep the number suppressed because it's my intention to remain noncommercial and because I would hope not to attract the attention of Blogger, which might try to layer in a commercial element if my numbers suggested that traffic is high enough to support their advertising.

I don't intend to sell ads, but because I'm using a free platform, I don't necessarily have control over what end users see on their screens.  Cartoon from this site.

You may wonder how on earth a blog originating in a neighborhood of just 405 single family homes could possibly generate even that much traffic...?! 

The answer is that blogs are inherently non-local phenomena.  I publish information that is intended to be of use to people here in our area, but the same information is also being sought by other Americans in other subdivisions all across the country.  Rodents, fence stain, paint colors, snakes, landscaping challenges - these are issues that all homeowners face, and they are smart enough to glean the answers to their questions from their peers - not from commercial entities whose primary goal is to sell them some products and whose perspectives are warped accordingly.  People want ideas and evaluations, not sales pitches. 

And from the statistical code that is invisibly embedded in this blog, I can see that those people are, indeed, doing just that.  Knock wood, I've got no bot traffic at this point - I'm seeing just the surfings of ordinary Americans looking for answers to common predicaments.  And that's good, because those are the people I intended to serve when I started this thing.  Serve, as in, provide useful information without expectation of any form of reciprocation.  Not make money at their expense.

So here's to the next ten thousand ordinary Americans, whoever they may prove to be.  Bottoms up, under-the-commercial-radar style.
:-)