1 Year a Blog (How Time's Flown / Haven't You Grown)

Wow, it’s really true. On this day, exactly one year ago, I started my blog, a culmination of thoughts, wishes and inspirations that had been gathering inside me for a while, with no real clue how it would turn out or if I’d ever be able to stay with it. Because on all my creative projects over the years, the biggest problem was always consistency, to keep doing it even beyond the first excitement of starting something. And now, twelve months later, I’m still here, still writing and I’m not planning on stopping. A good time to pause and reflect upon what happened and what it means.

As I explained more than once by now, I started this blog mainly because I was inspired to do something after seeing Noam Chomsky live and feeling that I must do more than just teach. Since I always wanted to write, this seemed like a good idea. I settled on a concept (every second post about a movie, anything else in every other post) and found some ideas for recurring posts on various topics. In-between there is always time for a rant on something I feel strongly about or that makes me think. That is what this is, writing down whatever I’m thinking about.

Some numbers: this is the 225th post in 365 days, so while I clearly moved away from the ambition of posting daily (which I only managed for about three [crazy] months), I normally try to have no more than two days between posts (there are exceptions, of course), meaning still a lot of posts. I wrote about 200,000 words, which is a bit more than 900 words per post, about ten times more than my play and roughly the length of a (short) novel. Considering that I started this to write something, I’m somewhat impressed by that number. I wrote about more than 100 different movies, 3 books, 13 albums and one capital (London!). After movies, my most used topics are school (28), music (25) and comics (11).

But what does it matter if I write so much and nobody cares? I feel slightly embarrassed writing about visitors and views, because I fear you will laugh about the low numbers that make me happy. I have roughly 10 different visitors per day on average with the record being 21 and the lowest being 1 (always at least one!). I am happy to have 10 people checking out my blog each day and I’m aware that this is not an impressive number. The numbers are slowly moving up, though (very slowly), and I can only speculate a little bit on what posts are more popular. New and popular movies work well, personal posts and posts about school, too, everything else is pretty random. I’m not really keeping track of what are the most popular posts (I’m too statistics-obsessed as it is), so this doesn’t influence what I write about too much. One thing I have been seeing since I’ve started is that some posts get a lot of hits for strange reasons like Yankee Doodle Dandy or Comics Are For Everyone: 1940 Edition (which has to be because there is “spanking” in the title, which should not be a guide to how I can get more hits).

If I look back at all the posts I’ve written (or their titles), I’m sometimes surprised because I have forgotten a lot of them or can’t remember what I had to say (Paul?). Often, though, I also think: “Oh yes, that was a good one.” I’m still really happy with the Teacher Looks at Class three-parter and wish I had had any similar creative ideas like that. I also fondly remember all the really extensive movie reviews because it makes me happy to think of how some movies make me think so much that I could write forever about them (good or bad). And I love the theme weeks so very much (even if the last one has been a while ago, but it won’t be long). I still have ideas for other kind of theme weeks but whenever I think of them, the years always win with a bigger appeal.

On the other hand, I also look at older posts and feel bad that I haven’t revamped them since the move from Wordpress, so some of them look really awful, with tiny pictures and messy formatting. It’s even worse to find mistakes all the time because I’m too eager to post to read anything before I post it (and no one has yet given me money for an editor). But I'll work on that in the future.

But overall I’m happy with everything I’ve done here. This blog has become a very important part of my life, the place where I can gather my thoughts and share them. It gives everything I’m thinking about a certain structure, which I find helpful. I don’t plan to ever stop writing as I still have enough topics to write (like the very popular school series that gives me a lot to write about) and always enough movies (more than enough at the moment). I don’t know if I actually achieve anything with this, but is important enough for me to keep going. I always have something to speak up about, questions to ask and sometimes answers that make sense to me. That’s what the blog is called, that is always my goal, with every topic and every movie.

So, on to another year of hopefully many more to come.

I thank everyone who inspires me.

I thank everyone who supports me.

I thank everyone who takes the time to read my rambling.

(especially the few wonderful people where all three apply).

I again idealistically, hopelessly and desperately ask for feedback because it is extremely helpful. I can always use suggestions and am happy for any comment, question, advice, proposal or offer. Thank you, constant reader (shameless, I know), thank you.