10 Years of Blogging and Counting
I have reached a blogging milestone that I think it is fair to say not many reach. I have been blogging for 10 years. I wrote a nice post back in January recapping the past 10 years. Rather than rehash that entire post I would encourage anyone interested to go read that post, where I wax poetically about the past decade. Instead I would like to focus on just the blogging aspect of this milestone.
There have been many statistics about how most blogs are never updated after the first post or so, it is actually very unusual for the majority of blogs to make it past 1 year. I would gather that the number of blogs created daily has fallen drastically with the popularity of Twitter and Facebook filling the niche for many. I have many of the posts I wrote over the past 10 years in the archives, but not all. This domain, scott.buffington.me, has only been my blogging home for the past few years. Prior to that I blogged many years from nitevilla.net as well as some other random domains. While nitevilla.net still exists, as a place to test code, the posts that originally resided there either reside here or they are gone. Over the years I have decided to remove some posts, for example, I once participated in something called a Blogathon where I posted a blog post once every half hour for 24 hours. I removed all those posts and many others that I felt offered little in the way of content.I could argue that I have been blogging longer than 10 years, I have been posting topics to the web on personal websites dating back to the mid 1990s, but prior to owning my own domains those posts were on sites like Geocities and those web pages are long gone.
Probably the most unique thing about my blog is not only have I managed to keep posting over the past 10 years, though not as much in recent years, but also that I still use a homegrown blogging solution. Those with the technical know how usually give up on the homegrown solution and migrate to Wordpress or one of the many other blogging platforms. I am proud that I have continued to support my own solution and have at this point made the decision that I will continue using my own solution until the web changes in some way where it would not be possible.
Now the hard numbers, this is my 653rd entry appearing on this domain. That is an average of 0.17 entries per day or one blog post every 5.5 days. As of this post, there are 1,171 comments appearing on this blog. My homegrown blogging solutions has blocked 69,765 spam comments, since I began keeping count. I would be remiss if I did not mention that I had a forum on nitevilla.net that I maintained for six or seven years before it became stagnant. During the early years of nitevilla.net, the forums were decently active with probably 20 or 30 visitors posting regularly. My blog actually lost quite a few regular readers when I shutdown the forum. I wanted to start focusing items I would often post to the forum instead to my blog. In hindsight i am not sure that decision had the effect I had hoped it would. Then again, it might be the other social changes that have occurred on the web that have limited blog interactions.
