Yesterday’s post was my 100th since starting this blog almost six years ago.
That’s right. It took me five years and ten months to post 100 blog entries. I wrote almost half of them in the last twelve months, and more than half of this year’s posts have been published in the past four weeks.
Pardon me, I get excited about metrics.
My desire to write a blog goes back almost to the beginnings of the term “blog” itself. I started my first blog in 1999, shortly after my divorce. I used a personal web page from my provider, and it was so obscure that wayback machine doesn’t even have it archived. I hadn’t even heard of Blogger at that point, and WordPress was years away, so it was a static page, hand-coded using HTML 4. For feedback, I provided an email link.
I wrote mostly about liberal politics, but I might as well have been posting random words from the dictionary for all the attention it got. No one read me. I had no idea how to draw readers. The one and only time I got a response was on September 12, 2001, after I wrote a post critical of the sentiment that one must not disagree with the President after the September 11 attacks. Someone emailed me to call me a traitor, and offered to kick my ass.
I suppose I should have been afraid, but I was actually thrilled. Someone had read me! Someone I didn’t even know!
Unfortunately, that was about it in terms of audience engagement. I eventually moved to Blogger and embedded LiveJournal into it, but all the action was within LiveJournal. Eventually, I shut down the blog. Without an audience, why bother?
The desire persisted, though, and I made half-hearted attempts a couple of times. I tried blogging about Scrum, but I felt like I didn’t know enough to write about it. I’d lost interest in writing about politics, because increasing polarization meant I was only talking to people who already largely agreed with me. I didn’t feel like anyone was interested in reading about my life in general.
Now I’m blogging every day but I’m still not sure what I’m doing. When I started the daily blog challenge four weeks ago, I thought I’d write mostly about agile software development. But when I get home each night, work is the last thing I want to think about. My posts about my experience in a Pentecostal church were well-received, so maybe I should write more about that topic. It would be good fodder for the novel I plan to write next, and maybe exploring that part of my past will be good for my psyche.
Sam Falco 