50th Post: State of the Blog

This is my 50th published post on this blog. I gotta, say, while I'm not surprised that I've been able to write 50 rants about things that matter to me way more than they probably should, I am surprised that this blog has actually grown the way it has, so I thought I'd take a moment to talk a little about how this started, where it's gone since, and what I hope for the future.

Long before I started this blog, I had (and still have) a tendency to get very long-winded with arguments in forums, comments, and social media. The problem is that those places aren't particularly well-suited to arguments in essay length. So one day I decided that it would probably be best to create a blog so that when I felt the need to rant about one thing or another, I could do so on my own terms without having to speak directly to any specific community.

Initially, I just started by making posts and linking them to my direct friends. This resulted in maybe 10 or so visits with each post and usually just shortly after the post was made. This was pretty much the norm. Occasionally I would get one or two StumbleUpons or Google searches, but for the most part, the only people reading my blog were friends.

This was fine, of course. I didn't start this blog to become Internet famous (although I implemented ads in case I did). I just wanted a place to write and express myself.

Then I started posting links to all my new entries through Tumblr, which worked surprisingly well, particularly in regards to my posts about Deadpool. I've found that Deadpool is REALLY popular on Tumblr. Since I've started posting Tumblr links, traffic started becoming more frequent and spread out throughout the day.

Then there was a bit of an... explosion.

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about why I thought Windows 8 would be a massive failure. At first, this post didn't get very many views, even among my friends. Again, this didn't really bother me. Then about a week later, someone posted a link to this post in a comment thread on slashdot and over the course of about 24 hours, traffic exploded resulting in just that post alone getting around 800 views. Granted, it was just a single surge, but since then, traffic has continued to rise.

Before, I would get somewhere between 10-30 views on a day when I posted new material. Now I get about 50 views on a day when I post NO new material and around 100 when I do.

All in all, I've hit a little over 3000 views since I started back in June, about 2/3 of which are just from August.

I know this isn't much in the grand scheme of the Internet, but for a guy who's always been more than a little insecure, this blog has been a great source of pride. I'm very fortunate to have such good friends who have read most of my posts and I'm also fortunate to have a decent number of anonymous followers who check in periodically to see what I have to say.

So I really just wanted to say thank you to everyone who's continued to make me feel welcome in the blogosphere.

I do hope that my blog continues to grow. I intend to get back into doing the Old Who Reviews, since that's one of the earliest ideas I had for a blog and it's something I enjoy doing. I'm also looking forward to the new episodes of "Doctor Who" starting up in a few weeks, so you can bet I'll be reviewing those too, though probably not in the same format as my other Who Reviews.

Anyway... 50 posts! 3000 hits! Woo!