5-Year Blogiversary

WordPress very kindly informed me that today is my 5-year blogging anniversary. Wow.

Of course, it started over at that other blog.

I blogged there for about a year and a half before starting up this one. In the process, I did copy over my blog posts, so this blog does contain it all.

And by “all”, there really is a lot.

WordPress keeps all sorts of numbers for a blog, so why don’t I share some of them with you.

This is my 1,189th post, which is about 238 posts a year. When I first started out, I only posted a new entry every 2nd or 3rd day. Once I moved here, I somehow managed to increase that. It does get tiresome after a while, though. After all, how many times can you make fun of an article that thinks wearing a minimal shoe makes you “barefoot”? Within the last year or so, though, I’ve settled down into a bit of a pattern that makes it easier: Saturdays have a comic (so I don’t have to think too hard) and I take Sundays off, along with an occasional weekday when I just don’t feel like writing anything.

I have a bit over ¾-million hits (combining the two blogs—that’s how many people have read a barefoot-related article from me). It looks kind of impressive, but it’s really not. Over a 5-year period, 1826 days, it’s not that much. But then the barefooting community is really fairly small. And who says they have to read my blog, either?

I’ve mentioned before that what has drawn the most hits is what I wrote about Dual Survival. That has drawn non-barefooters to the blog; I hope they maybe investigated further.

From my traffic logs, I can easily see when that happens. Traffic spikes, and they are all on specific articles. But sometimes traffic spikes and there is no obvious reason. But then it hit me. If somebody stumbles across my blog and decides to look at every single article, that’s 1,189 hits right there.

WordPress also tells me that I have 213 subscribers who get a notice sent to them whenever I produce a new entry. There are also 3,321 comments from you all on the different entries. Comments are always appreciated: it shows somebody at least is paying attention. 🙂

When you add it all up, I’ve written about ¾-million words. WordPress doesn’t tell me that; I had to calculate that myself. But that does mean I’ve probably covered most issues of interest to barefooters, often multiple times. And that means that if you have some question about going barefoot, you can probably go to my blog, do a search, and find out what I’ve written about it. (It also means that Google searches often will show one of my blog entries—that also gets me traffic.)

I do try to be humorous, and (I hope it shows), often seem to put more thought in a post title than in the rest of the entry.

I hope to keep doing this for a while at least. I still have a few ideas I’ll write about eventually. (I have to let the harder ones that require more research or thought percolate a bit before I feel like going through the effort of putting it together.) And as I said before, who’d have ever thought that a physics major would end up writing a nearly-daily essay?

So, here’s to the blog. Hope you’ve all enjoyed it so far.

5 Years

Oh, and in case you are interested, here’s my very first blog entry, published September 3, 2009: Article in New York Times. Some things just don’t change.