10 Years of Blogging
Just over 10 years ago on March 10, 2010, I started this blog. I had aimed to do this post in March but we had a pandemic among other things were going on and I missed it. But in that time, I've published nearly 1800 posts. That averages to about 3 posts a week or about 14.5 posts per month. I wish I could say that I have been that steady, but the numbers are slightly swayed by two 365-day projects that I did: one on short stories (still my most popular posts) and one on photo reflections. Still, I'm proud that not only did I outlast the traditional life span of a blog (6 months) but that this blog has grown and developed in different ways over the years, often reflecting my own growth and development.
I first started this blog because I was playing around a lot more with web 2.0 and starting to think about how it might be effective for teaching. In the early posts, I wrote pieces that connected to the courses that I was teaching and used it as a space to bring together students from different institutions that I was teaching at to converse around those subjects. This was back when I was teaching 5-6 different institutions and piecing together life as an adjunct. You can tell how different it was because the first blog post itself was about the title, which at the time was "The Hitchhiking Adjunct"--a fitting name at the time. I think I changed the title to By Any Other Nerd sometime in 2013 and a few years after that relocated the blog link from the Blogspot link to its own domain.
Over the years, the blog has been a place for me to share some of my writings from other publications and websites. It serves as a good focal point for my thoughts on running as I trained for my first marathon. It continually is a place I think about issues of racism, privilege, white supremacy, and anti-racism. And of course, it has been my go-to place to discuss the progress on my dissertation (mental note: need to update that!).
One thing that I like but is also a challenge for the blog is for it to be just one thing. Many popular blogs are popular because they focus on just one thing or space. But this blog is reflective of me and spans many areas. When i look at my tags, I find that books, literature, and short stories are the biggest categories (each in the 400s in terms of number of posts). Since many of those overlap, that's still less than a quarter of the blog posts herein. So books is a strong part of the blog but not the only one. Thus, it's hard to call this a book blog, even though books are a significant part of it. It could also be considered a bit of a journal blog, just sharing personal experiences, but I think a fair share of my pieces do more than that. Maybe that's why I've been able to continue to do it as I am able to bend the blog to what I need it to be for whatever I'm focusing on next. Who knows!
Anyway, this was just a brief reflection to note that this blog has been going strong for 10 years and hopefully, will be here for another ten years! What about you? Whether you've recently tuned in or are a regular reader (google analytics tells me that I do have these folks--I swear--hahaha), what keeps you coming back to read my writing on this blog that seems to be "taking a ride into whatever direction opportunities and life takes me."
Thank you for reading and sticking around!
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