Thanksgiving weekend a year ago, I was able to pull the trigger and get this blog finished and moving. Given my personal site had been neglected for years, it was an accomplishment, and the fact that I’ve actually used it, and updated it, for a year, is to me another one (I have a tendency to let things fall off before a year has passed). With that in mind, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on a year here and what it’s meant.
While I didn’t meet my goal of trying to post daily (life will do it to you, although I could’ve committed more firmly), I managed about 115 posts in year one, good for roughly one post every three days. The first 35 posts came in the initial euphoria, and since then, minus a couple of larger gaps, I’ve been posting roughly 10 posts a month, generally in clumps, as I make it in to put together some content a couple of times a month.
Despite the struggle, re-reading my mission statement from a year ago, I didn’t hit far from what I expected. This blog has been more music heavy than I expected, and less tech-oriented, but 2013 proved to be an above-average year (in my humble opinion) for releases that caught my attention, both the good and the bad. I’ve also over time had fun writing about older music and connecting dots between artists and songwriters a bit, which has led to a heavier focus this year.
A bit of personal life has popped up, as I hoped, and there’s definitely an occasional connection to work, probably inevitable given how much it’s on my mind. There’s also loose ends and missing pages I never got around to fixing (although the broken links to them were finally removed last month; from the looks of the stats no one tried to click them anyway.)
And what were you reading? It’s the Christmas Present posts that have drawn much of the attraction, although the post on the Cadbury Scream Egg did get some notice. I also got some boosts thanks to Chenot Keith of Mission Zero spreading the word on some of my pieces about them this year (thanks, and I’m sure I’ll be featuring them again soon thanks to the tease I just saw about a new video!).
So, onward to year two, which technically began Thursday. Once again I’m attempting to pick up the pace back to a daily post, and with a bunch of drafts of topic ideas, I’m not dry for thoughts at the moment, but we’ll see how it goes. Either way, lots of gratitude to those of you reading (and to those of you who made it to the end of this post), and I look forward to keeping going!