Last Updated on February 5, 2022
Suddenly I feel like the Energizer Bunny: Still Going! But today, I celebrate another blogging anniversary.
This blog’s first post came on this date in 2004.
That means, if I do my simple math correctly, that today marks a dozen years that I’ve been writing away here at this site. It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing it that long. It’s even harder for me to believe that there are a handful of readers who have been with me for most, if not all, of those 12 years.
When I talk with other people who are interested in blogging and they find out mine is more than 10 years old, they ask me how I do it. When they find out that for the last three years or so I’ve been posting daily, they ask me how I haven’t had a nervous breakdown or simply run out of things to talk about by now.
I don’t know that there’s ever a time we won’t have things to talk about.
That’s not to say that there aren’t days that I don’t find coming up with that day’s topic difficult; but I don’t think the two are the same. I think that’s more of a temporary condition we like to call “Writer’s Block,” or, in this medium, “Blogger’s Block.”
I’ve never believed that Blogger’s Block, even phases of it that seem to linger for a while, mean that it’s time to retire your keyboard and go fishing, shuttering the blog forever.
I just think that could be a sign that your topics or your ideas need a bit more planning so that by the time you sit down to write a post, you know where you’re going and how you’ll get there in that post.
But one of the reasons I keep on trucking along here at Patrick’s Place is what I find when I check my stats.
Let me be clear: this little blog is in no danger of setting any page view records. But still, it continues to grow year to year. No, that growth doesn’t come as quickly as I might like, but on the other hand, that allows for a bit more of an intimate setting that seems to do well.
In 2015, I find that the total number of page views were up 17.15% over 2014’s. The number of unique visitors — the individual people who visited this site over the year — was up by 26.46%. That means that 26% more people stopped by hear at some point in 2015 than in 2014.
I’m grateful for each one.
It’s amazing what you can learn about your own site if you really pay attention to your site’s statistics. You learn what your audience seems to like and what they allow to pass on by. And sometimes, you can gain a bit of “permission” for yourself to abandon certain topics that you may have lost interest in, particularly if it appears your audience isn’t as interested, either. That has definitely happened for me over 12 years, and I think the blog is better for it.
So here’s to the next dozen years and beyond.
As always, thanks for reading!
