Monday, September 12, 2011

Milestones

A couple of interesting – well, if you're me that is; if you're not, they'll probably seem meaningless – milestones went by over the last few days.

Number one

My blog registered – according, at least, to the attached stats-counter – it's ten thousandth hit. And here's a picture (click on it to enlarge; the important heading is 'Pageviews all time history':


My very first post – Jamie joins the blogosphere1 – was all the way back in 2008, on Christmas Day, and I've written another 88 posts since then (not including this one), about all sort of things: theatre, television, film being the most popular specific topics, though I got into a habit of writing about assorted topics under the title of 'the week that was'2.

Some, I admit, are nothing special. But there are a few I'm really happy I wrote – How My Teenage Years Would've Been Better If I'd Had Access to Alternative Music; ...about Twilight; The Global Atheist Conference; Ella Enchanted, Anne Hathaway and Queen being the ones I'm most fond of.

Oh, and then there's Thinking about Inking. Not one I'm wildly enthusiastic about – if for no other reason than I haven't actually gone through with any of the tattoos I wrote about considering getting done, making it a bit embarrassing – but it is far and away my most popular post, by a huge margin; of the 10,000 hits, it's responsible for nearly 4,000 of them.

Why? Two reasons: the Irish harp and the fleur-de-lis. Apparently, a lot of people are looking for pictures and information about those two things, and I mentioned both in that blog post. But I have serious doubts about whether too many of those who've found their way to my blog via those two items stuck around to read my thoughts on the Adelaide theatre scene.

While I've never been as prolific as I'd have liked – at most I've put up maybe seven posts in the space of a single month – I have enjoyed it. The whole reason behind my starting the blog was to make sure that, since I wasn't doing any real creative writing, I was doing at least some writing, 'keeping my hand in', so to speak.

Hence why the vast majority aren't especially serious or penetrating or insightful – like the film and television reviews. But every now and then something will come along that I consider worthy of more serious analysis.

I've also meant to get back into writing what I've described as super-short fiction – single-paragraph short stories based on a randomly chosen word or concept – that I took up to help keep myself sane3 when I worked in a call centre and had a pen and paper on hand while I asked people inane questions about their radio listening habits. But apart from the three posts' worth I transcribed (here, here and here) I haven't done that either.

Hmm, now I'm starting to feel that this is more about me realising that I there are more things that I haven't achieved with the blog than things I have.

But that doesn't mean I won't at some point. Here's hoping.

1Yeah, that's a lame title. But I was – as I usually am – in a hurry to get the damn thing finished.
2Okay, let's just say I'm not good with titles. At least most of the time.
3Well, relatively.

Number two

I tweeted my five thousandth tweet this week. I blogged about getting into Twitter (back in January 2009) here, and have been going strong ever since.

Here's what number 5,000 looked like:


And, like blogging, I have no intention of stopping; it's way too much fun. And now there are more people tweeting, the potential for useful information has increased substantially – and it's only going to get bigger.

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