Exactly ten years ago I started this blog. My first post on 13 November 2006, was very short:
My First Post
It's taken a long time but I've finally created my own blog. Here I hope to publish some thoughts, articles, reports, short stories, other publications - all of my own.
This is my first post!
1,820 posts later I am still at it - that's close to one post every two days. At the time I had no idea that blogging would become a huge part of what I do. Over the past ten years I have posted at irregular intervals. During 2011 (when I had been nominated for the Irish Blog Awards) I posted quite a lot - about 20-25 posts per month. Since 01 January 2016 I have been posting every day in an effort to see if I could keep this up for a year. - just 48 more posts to go! The chart below tracks monthly posts since I started:
This year has so far been the most prolific, though I freely admit that on many days I was very stuck for something to write. Since 2011 the trend was declining on a monthly basis - I guess the effort to post daily was a reaction to this.
Not that many people read this blog - I remind myself that the word "blog" is short for "Web Log" - a sort of on-line diary. So it is a very personal document, that just happens to be public. It's for me, and I like the freedom to be able to express myself like this. Quite a few people that see my posts do so in Facebook and LinkedIn - each post is automatically published to both these platforms (and to Twitter as well). This year I have my Mum and Dad reading this blog for the first time (Hiiiiiii!) - apart from occasional bad language and some shite (sorry!) posts, they like reading it.
In 2006 I set up the blog when I was teaching on the MSc in e-Learning that at the time was running in the College. It was a relatively new thing at the time as Web 2.0 started to allow more and more people publish content on-line. My blog is hosted on Google's Blogger platform. A lot of bloggers use WordPress, but I am happy with Blogger. At the time we were discussing in class how blogging could be used in education. Will Richardson's "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" was the textbook we referred to most. None of us could have predicted that people would be making money out of blogging (I don't), and there would be professional bloggers breaking the Internet.
Anyone can blog, and there is no failure. I like to think that I will keep on blogging for a long time to come. Actor Kirk Douglas will be 100 years old on 9th December next - he must be one of the world's oldest bloggers, He used to blog on MySpace, but now he blogs using the Huffington Post. Just last September he blogged about the the US Presidential Election. When he was born, Woodrow Wilson was President! If I survive as long as Douglas, I have 43 more years of blogging to go. Hopefully I will be able to say the same as him - he wrote in his last post:
My 100th birthday is exactly one month and one day after the next presidential election. I’d like to celebrate it by blowing out the candles on my cake, then whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
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