Two years of blogging

Where does the time go?  I can't believe it has been two years since I started this blog!  This was actually my second attempt at blogging.  The first, which I started a number of years ago, did not last more than a few months.  For some reason this time around I have been a lot more committed to keeping this thing alive.

My original intention with starting this blog was to have a place that I could take note of things that I found interesting, clarify my thinking and to flesh out ideas.  This kind of personal blogging is a strange thing.  It is like you are having this conversation with yourself that you are also openly sharing with whoever may want to be a part of it.  This curious combination does come at a price.  On one hand you are writing for completely personal reasons, but as time goes on and more people start to read your blog, you begin to think about things more from the readers perspective.  This, to some degree, can affects what you post since you are thinking about how you will be perceived by others.  I don't believe it has had a large impact on what I have written but it does cause one to pause and reflect before clicking the publish button.  On second thought maybe it isn't a negative at all since it can force you to give more consideration to things instead of just going with a preconceived bias.

Anyway, while I can't say that the blog has been a runaway success, it has been a lot of fun seeing it develop from a monthly average of 140 views the first year to 1080 average views the second year.  It's kind of funny how sometimes the posts you put the most into will get next to no views while the ones you put almost no thought into are most popular.  For instance, when I first started this blog I wrote two papers on the federal debt.  The first paper was an introduction to the problem while the second one delved more into the details.  Both were well cited works which took a fair amount of time to write.  To date, the first one has had thirty views and the second one has had ten views.  On the other side, I wrote a short post on the bare bones basics of flowcharts which has a simple example I nabbed from somewhere.  That post, for whatever reason, consistently gets hits every month and to date has had just over a thousand views.

Then there are the shooting star posts which shine brightly for a short period before burning out.  The one experience I have had with this was my post on a short sci-fi cgi film called Ruin.  I must have stumbled upon it at just the right moment.  Over the course of 3 days I received about two thousand views and then after that, next to nothing.

Anyway, I think overall the whole blogging thing has been a worthwhile endeavor.  I would like to thank those of you who have taken time out of your busy lives to share in some of my interests and thoughts.  I would also like to encourage you to try blogging out for yourselves.  I read a number of blogs myself but am especially interested in what friends and family members are thinking about.