1,301

Believe it or not, this is post 1,301 on this blog. Considering that in June I'll have been doing this for 6 full years, here are some fun statistics:

• This averages out to 217 posts a year.
• Which is a little more than 4 posts a week.
• Which means every day, on average, I write 4/5's of a post.

This is actually a little less than I would have thought, although I did have a few small hiatuses where I took a month or two off and didn't write a blasted thing, then again I had some weeks where I went off and blasted out 10 posts or more. I figured that it would average out to about one post per day, which I'm not quite at. If I want to catch up, I'm going to have write some multi-post days throughout the next couple of years, and that's assuming I write every day. I kind of doubt I'll be able to do that, so I should just resign myself to the fact that I don't produce nearly as much content as many of the blogs I read and love. Oh well.

Thinking about it, though, 6 years is quite a while. As I go back and read the archives, I'm confronted with so many bad posts where my writing style was terrible (or at least a little more terrible than it is now), I was talking about something completely ridiculous, or I was trying to be all "emotional" or witty or something that wasn't natural for me to write. On the flip side of the blogging coin, I noticed that I had a lot more drive back when I was starting out and also put a lot more of my personal life out there. I really tend not to do that any more just because I like to keep some parts of my life private, but it is interesting to think back to my mindset 3, 4, or 5 years ago.

At the time, I never worried about what I was writing getting back around to the people I was writing about because, in all seriousness, there wasn't anyone that really read it. I was simply journaling my thoughts, but instead of it going into a diary I put under my bed, it was tossed onto a server and was accessible via the internet. I, quite naively, assumed that I'd have tons of people just randomly falling onto my blog and would stick around to read it. Even more naively, I thought that was actually happening since I wasn't really keeping stats on how many page views I was getting. When I finally figured out how to track that, it was a huge let down to figure out that I was getting 10-12 page views a day and 8-9 of them were me making sure I had my formatting correct.

As it is now, I get anywhere from 15-75 page views a day, which is pretty abysmally tiny when it comes to blog popularity, but I've tended to care a little less. Sure, back in 2006 I had probably a few hundred views a day... but then I took a hiatus and no one really came back. Now, if you take into account that I have 25-30 people subscribed to my RSS feed, then I might be hitting 100 people in a day, which is pretty cool for a lame ass blog that has no real direction, but I still catch myself every now and again wondering how awesome it would be if I was widely read... but then I re-read my posts and realize that if I was ever going to get to that point I would need to post more, actually proof-read my stuff, and I'd need some type of focus. I'm not really willing to do that, however, so this site will be as half-assed as ever going forward.

Let's see if I have another 6 years in me... or at least shoot for one more and then see where this goes when I hit 7.