1,000 Blog Posts

It is just over six years since I set up this blog, and today marks my 1,000th post. On Monday November 13th 2006 I wrote My First Post. It was still to be a full year before I started to post on a regular basis as I only wrote 13 posts in the first year. When I set the blog up I had no intention of it becoming what it is today when I write about many different topics, and I had no idea that it would become such an important and valuable part of my life. I work on my blog almost every day and try to post at least 20 times a month. It's not quite every day that I post, but I do find myself writing almost all the time. 

There are times when I have nothing to say, and there are times when I have a lot to say. There are days when I have to search around my brain, or on-line to find ideas to write about, and there are other days when I have several options to write about. I usually have several working unpublished posts on the go and sometimes it takes more than one session to complete a post (I started this one yesterday). Just over a year ago I started tagging my posts and the screen shot of my Tag Cloud to the left gives an indication of the types of things I write about. Education and YouTube matters are dominant, but I also write about family and holidays, as well as other topics such as reviews of films/books/restaurants. It does take up quite a bit of time, but it is something I like to do in the evenings and weekends. I do most of my writing outside of work hours, but on educational matters I do use working time to write as I regard this as part of the role of a modern academic to have an outlet for their thoughts. This is becoming more popular among academics and I look forward to the day when most (if not all) academics do this.

Google only started providing detailed analytics on blogs in July 2008, and since then the blog has received 175,025 views. The United States and Ireland account for about 49% of total views. While I'm guessing that the USA views (48,768) are as the result of searches, I'm hoping that many of the 37,505 to date from Ireland are people actually reading something that I have written. Below are some more stats taken today:

I find blogging tremendously liberating and I only wish that I could have started doing this back in the 1960s when I first learned to read and write. What a personal treasure trove that would be. I'd like to think that I can keep doing this for the rest of my life! Tomorrow I will write about what I have learned from blogging.

Keep on Blogging!