Today I chanced to discover that Veggie Friendly was named on a list of the Top 20 food blogs in Australia. This was a particularly generous seeing as I actually came it at no. 21.

The list is compiled by the guy behind the Tomato food blog and is apparently based on your Technorati ranking. Luckily I had a whopping 16 links from nine sites. The more popular places had hundreds of links so not sure if I will make the grade next time around. If you want to help me keep the coveted 21st position please keep the links flowing in!

Seriously though, I’m surprised to see that I’m even a blip on the blogging radar given I only started Veggie Friendly this year. I’ve been surprised by the number of visits I’m getting - a couple of thousand each month in April and May, with not too much self-promotion. A lot of people are still coming to the site directly, but an increasing number are coming through search engines. Unfortunately my two stat programs return different results so still not sure exactly how many people are dropping by.

Have to say a special thanks at this point to the Melbourne and Canberra reviewers - you guys rock and you sure know how to pull the crowds with your erudite-yet-witty posts.

I know that the site visits are tiny compared with popular blogs but I’ll take what I can get. For a couple of years I ran a creative writing website with friends, and despite having a bigger profile I always thought it was hard work to get less hits than Veggie Friendly does now. I don’t know whether there are more people going online now, or if it’s that there is an increasing awareness of blogs, which weren’t really that popular when we ran the other site.

It seems to help that the content of Veggie Friendly is related to restaurants because this pulls in a wide range of searches. The most popular reviews and search terms are for iconic vegetarian and vegetarian friendly places, like Soul Mama and Lentil as Anything in Melbourne, and Bodhis, Mother Chu’s and Gertrude and Alice in Sydney. I’ll try and keep the focus on these places - been meaning to do Green Gourmet and Govinda’s in Sydney, for example. Also have a long list of improvements I want to make to the site. I guess this is what it feels like to own property and feel a constant need to renovate. Thank God I can’t afford a mortgage.

Anyway, enough navel-gazing for one night. I’m off to celebrate short-lived celebrity.

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