Going to talk about the blog a little bit, with two final posts to follow.
I started this blog on February 26th, 2009. That's 8 years and 7 months ago. The idea at the time was just to be a brain dump for me, but also to hopefully be entertaining and at times provide advice and/or drills. I had minimal experience with blogging, never really took the time to make this blog more attractive to get more traffic (sorry!), and most posts were written in less than a week's advance time.
Many times I would stare at the screen hoping for something to inspire a topic, sometimes for longer periods of time than others. When inspiration hit at random times, I wrote notes down to go to for when those creative droughts hit. Sometimes I felt I had some really interesting things to talk about, other times I would finish a "post" and feel very unsatisfied with it. It was almost like being a writer, because I was, well...writing.
I never wanted fame from this, but I did like hearing when people found my posts useful, and I even liked the few times people would argue with me, because it made me think and led to further discussion. Unfortunately, a blog isn't a good place to have conversations, so comments were few and far between.
I know I started repeating myself, intentionally when I came up with a new angle or deeper understanding, but as I reviewed my posts, unintentionally many times as well. After posting twice a week for many years, I'm not surprised that happened, and it's another good reason to come to an end. I'm sure I'll have more to say, more questions to ask, but it won't be through here.
A few random statistics for you to munch on:
- There were 875 published posts at the time of this post, plus 30 drafts that were either not fully-fleshed out or just didn't sound right.
- In the last year, the U.S. gave me 59% of my viewership, followed by 10% from the U.K., 5% from Russia, and 4% each from Canada and Germany.
- Last month I had 1,126 page views.
- My most popular post of all time was "The Tall Whisper" back in Dec. 2010, but I think some of this was due to people searching for pictures like the one I posted. The two most popular posts in the last 12 months were my Question Everything posts on kiai and bachi. (Links on the previous post.)
- 467 people viewed my Glossary, which was "in progress" pretty much always, ha.
- Most people found the blog from Google or directly, but very few from Facebook, which is surprising. But I didn't link many of my posts on Facebook, certainly nowhere near 875 of them.
- The average time spent on my blog was 1m24s. About enough time to read a single post, I would guess. Like this one. Which you are doing now. :)
image credit: https://janefriedman.com
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