Ten years of blogging today

A series of ten-year anniversaries is now going to feature in my posts. Mum's death on 3rd February 2009 (see my last post, two days ago) was the first one in 2019 that I wanted to write about.

Now another, hot on its heels: the tenth anniversary of my starting up this blog on 5th February 2009.

Incidentally, Google have for some reason amended my start-up date to 'May 2011' (see my full profile), but I have copies of all the posts I've ever published, and they really did begin on this date ten years ago.

I admit to being a prolific (and at times verbose) blogger. Here are the stats.

Posts published in the last ten years: 2,029
Words written in the last ten years: 1,794,247

That's an awful lot of keyboard-strokes! I wonder that my PC and laptop keyboards could take it. It's also a lot of posts for anybody to produce, even though I have never confined myself to just one topic.

If you haven't been with me from the start, you may not have seen the posts I published up to 2014. I took them all down in June and July last year, and somewhat thinned-out the collection from 2015 to mid-2018. That's why, if you glance at the 'Blog Archive' on the right-hand edge of this web page, the number of posts doesn't match what I say above.

I had that purge so that posts that didn't connect with my present life, and present ways of seeing the world, were removed from view. They have historical interest of course, so are preserved in my private records. But I wanted any reader who was inclined to explore the blog to find stuff that reflected me as I am now, and not as the limited-horizon person I used to be.

At the beginning, the blog was certainly a kind of therapy - a way of coping with Mum's death and my fraught personal situation. Then it was a way of exploring the many changes in my life, and expressing a view on them. That didn't go down well with some people in the same boat as myself, who had their own very definite ideas on the Right Way for a woman to live - one or two being very forthright in correcting what they thought were my misconceptions, misunderstandings, delusions and disqualifications to exist. As if I'd insulted some holy writ on How To Live and What To Think. All rather scary.

Where are they now? What happened to them? Did they make out as well as I have? I hope they did find a way. There was never any universally 'right' or 'wrong' path to take, only the particular path that was best suited to the person concerned, the one that led to the most contentment.

Gradually the blog became a chronicle of what I did - my travels, my interests, the things that caught my attention. Some of that has been popular with readers, some less so.

The blog was most popular (and most relevant to other people) up to 2014. Since then, since I let old themes go and began writing about all kinds of general subjects, readership has been distinctly less. I don't mind. The blog is a useful outlet for an ongoing impulse to write, especially as I can illustrate the posts with my own photography. It's developed into a (selective) online personal diary as much as anything else, and I am not interested in playing a numbers game.

Nevertheless in ten years I've garnered almost 946,000 viewings, and the total is slowly but steadily heading for one million. It'll be nice to get there. Sometimes bloggers stop when that milestone is reached, having run out of things to say, or wanting to draw a line. I don't think I will. Once those car loans (to replace bits of Fiona's worn-out transmission back in 2015 and 2016) are out of the way in August this year, my caravanning (and my travelling) will go to a new level. That may mean Ireland and forays onto continental Europe. Plenty to write about if I do a fraction of what I will be able to afford.