Happy Birthday to my blog – one year old

On the 15th March 2008 I started this blog as a form of something to do, an experiment and maybe to improve my writing. Improving my writing skills has definitely mean a bonus of writing this – considering I haven’t written anything since I left school (not forgetting my OU course last year of course). I’ve never written a diary before, so I’m quite amazed that I have managed to maintain this for a year. With the exception of Christmas and a weeks holiday in September where I had a few of good friends write guest posts for me, I have written everyday. In total a 352 posts – wow, that is a lot of rambling for one person.  I haven’t read back on all my posts but I feel like that at the beginning of the blog I was in quite a happy place and then in the autumn it all went a bit wrong with my anxiety issues.  Still I like to think that this blog is a form of therapy and helps a lot with my fears.

So, what of the future of my blog? Do I keep writing it? Is a year enough wittering for my readers to read? Will I start repeating myself even more now? Will I start to lose readers now as they get bored with it?  My thoughts at the moment (purely for my sanity) is to keep it going and to start redesigning the actual site so the readers that I have who read the actual site as oppose to a feed reader, will get a nice surprise. It also gives me an opportunity to practice my CSS skills which I must get back in to.  So, here is to another year of thoughts – happy and sad, rants, therapy sessions and generally letting people know how I feel or what I have been doing. Here is a quick breakdown on the stats for my little blog – warning no big stats here!

Total views: 8,658
Busiest day: 87 — 11 November, 2008
Total posts: 355
Comments: 224
Average per day: 24 unique views

Top Posts:
1. Romford Ice Rink – an update – 569 views
2. Conor Oberst set list – 514 views
3. London elections and Banksy – 348 views

Top Search Terms:
banksy: 426
Conor Oberst setlist: 155
Conor Oberst set list: 143
goldfish: 122
daoust 501: 55

I have a feeling that with WordPress stats it doesn’t pick up feeds as well so I might be missing some important views. Maybe I should install Google Analytics to find out more about my readers but then again I don’t want this to become a stats competition. That’s not the reason for this blog – it’s just for my own amusement. Thank you to everyone who has read and keeps reading Mj’s blog!