Believe it or not, it’s been ten years since I started blogging here. Sure, I started the website even before then and the blog has changed a lot since those initial entries, but it’s still an important milestone. Going back to read those first posts is a bit painful, what with the embarrassing attempts at humor and reliance on some of the lame weblog tropes of the day, but I’m ultimately pretty happy with my blog.
In the beginning, I had focused on smaller entries and reached a peak posting rate of just a little less than one a day. However, this was unsustainable, especially if I didn’t just want to keep repeating stuff that other people were posting. From there, things floundered a bit for about a year or two until I set a weekly schedule for myself, committing to at least one entry a week (on Sunday). The thought was that having a regular posting interval would make it easier on readers, who would know when to expect new content. The schedule was later amended to include at least two entries a week, and I’ve kept to that schedule pretty well over the past several years.
I’d also like to think that the quality of my writing has improved, though I have to say that I feel like I’ve been a bit of a funk lately. I’ve been relying on formulaic and not terribly inspired posts like link dumps and doing less writing of consequence. More and more it seems like I don’t really have a good idea what I’m going to write about when I sit down on Wednesday or Sunday, and all too often, I end up firing out an entry in about an hour or so (this post will probably fall into that category, though I knew I wanted to write it). These entries often come out better than I thought at the time, but they’re still not my best work. I’ve been blogging long enough to recognize that this sort of thing happens from time to time though, and I often feel better after a few months, so I’m not looking to make any drastic changes. I considered taking some time off to see if my brain would recharge or reconfigure itself or something, but I think whatever success I’ve had with this blog has been due to my schedule. Plus, I do have some longer and more involved pieces in the works, so hopefully I’ll be able to polish some of those off soon…
One of the interesting things about running a blog for so long is that I’ve developed some strange habits. For instance, I often find myself thinking about whether or not something I’m doing or watching or reading is blog-worthy. A lot of people blog because they have something to say or because it’s timely and relevant, and I suppose I do that too, but I also blog to learn about things that interest me. Most current events don’t really fall into that category until after the fact (if at all). But I am, of course, interested in lots of things and even writing a quick post on a complex subject can lead to deeper understanding. Writing a a longer form essay often takes me to all sorts of interesting places that I never even intended to visit when I started writing, and those end up being my favorite posts. Usually such posts burrow into my mind and grow follow-up posts (which is perhaps another thing that only a blogger could appreciate).
In the ten years I’ve been running the blog, I’ve never really had that large of an audience. I’ve had a small and loyal following, and for those readers I am very grateful, but this blog was never entirely about that. Of course, the blog is public, and so I do very much appreciate whatever limited attention I get, but it’s always been more about what interests me at any given time, and often that doesn’t lend itself to the sort of thing that make blogs popular (i.e. timely events and controversial stances in short, easy to read chunks, etc…). This isn’t a complaint, as I don’t think I’d enjoy having a tremendously popular blog; that entails all sorts of other frustrations that I’d rather not deal with.
In any case, since I’ve already done a detailed look at the history of the site, I figure there’s not much to say at this point. I realized that I hadn’t updated the Best Entries category in a few years, so I added a bunch of posts I thought worthy (if you have any favorites of your own, let me know) and hopefully I’ll be writing many more posts that belong there in the future. Just for the heck of it, here are some of my favorite posts from the past year or so:
- Remix Culture and Soviet Montage Theory
- Best Films of 2009
- Visual Literacy and Rembrandt’s J’accuse
- Six Weeks of Halloween 2009: Week 1 – Universal Horror
- Noir Ends
- Interrupts and Context Switching
- The Motion Control Sip Test
- A Decade of Kaedrin
And I think that about wraps it up for now.