My blog is almost an adult after turning seventeen today. On June 11, 2006, twelve years after the first blog post appeared online, I wrote my first post. In those early days, the blogosphere was far smaller than it is today. Individuals, not corporations maintained most blogs , and many of us came to know one another and follow each other’s blogs. I still am in contact with bloggers I met in the first year or two of blogging.
You can see a timeline of the history of blogs on the Notre Dame of Maryland University website. You can read posts that tell the story of this blog by doing a search for blog birthday.
For several years, starting a couple of months after I began this blog, I maintained a blog on Blogger.com as well as on my website. I’d almost forgotten about that until I saw Blogger on the blog timeline. If I remember correctly, I thought I would get more traffic on Blogger.com. That site contained many individual blogs on one site, whereas to find the blog on this site, people had to look for it or find a link somewhere. Most of the posts on Blogger were simply links to posts from this site.
I’d had a website for about seven years before I added the blog. I had a page of news, where I posted time-sensitive material, but I had to make the entries in HTML any time I wanted to update. Then I was able to add WordPress to my website through the control panel for the site. It was essentially a separate installation. However, it was connected to the main site, and I didn’t have to add code to make any changes. Then WordPress grew and became a content management system. I could create pages as easily as posts, so I moved my entire site to WordPress and have used WordPress exclusively ever since.
In that first post, I mentioned topics I would cover in my blog. Through the years, I have covered those topics, but I also cover themes that I didn’t realize would be important to me. Devotionals and posts about faith abound. In fact, there are way more posts about Christianity than any other topic.
In my post celebrating my blog’s fourth birthday, I wrote this:
As I looked forward to the blog’s fourth birthday, I noticed that another milestone was also approaching. I was very close to 800 posts. So for the last three weeks, I’ve posted four times a week instead of three, and voila: post #800 appears four years after post #1.
I could quote other statistics, such as 14,000+ real comments and 285,000 spam comments. However, the most important highlights of four years of blogging can’t be measured. The friends I’ve made, the things I’ve learned, the fun I’ve had have made the past four years a delight. I look forward to the next four years and the next 800 posts.
4 Years and 800 Posts!
I haven’t allowed comments on the blog for several years now. As you can see from the stats above, comments required a lot of time and effort to moderate and delete the spam. Legitimate comments seldom appear on blog posts anymore; posts on social media linking to the blog get far more comments than posts on the blog. So I save time and energy by not allowing comments.
Now, it’s 17 years and 2,493 posts, and I still look forward to more friends, more lessons, and lots more fun!