Happy 10th blogiversary to me

Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom coined the term "weblog" Dec. 17, 1997.  It meant a diary or log kept on the world wide web in reverse chronological order, or simply BLOG, that others could read. Technically, I started blogging on October 3, 2003, but then back dated it to October 1 because it just looked untidy the other way.

Barger thought blogs should be primarily links to other people’s writings. Why I don’t know.  I like to include links to the articles and sources I cite, but it’s just plain boring to come across a blog that has two sentences and then a link to someone else who thought of it first and did the research.

I’m not sure when blogging peaked—maybe 2005-2006, as least for young people—so it was hot less than a decade.  Now if I want to read the people I met blogging I need to track them down on Face Book, Twitter, or Pinterest because after 2012 it was just hard to find them.  Social media has moved on to the pithy and brief, the bitter and sarcastic.

For this blog I’ve written over 12,000 posts and had about 580,000 page views in 10 years (Blogger tracks that for me).  But I have 9 other blogs, or maybe 10, so all told, I’ve said and read a lot in 10 years. I used to print them off (don’t really trust Google to maintain Blogger forever), but that soon became a space hog in my office, so I quit doing that about 5 years ago.

Here’s what I used to blog about—13 topics.  The longer I was retired, the less I wrote about libraries; the older I got the less I said about parenting; after a few years, I’d pretty much exhausted my memory on the good old days and family stories; the people who ran the memes like Thursday 13 and Monday Memories and the poetry challenges all turned to other ventures.  So that sort of leaves “current events,” or what a mess the world is in.  And recipes.  That’s always a good fall back.