By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes This post is less about the highlights of 2023 and more about the things that I experienced and learned about myself through this year.  2023 was a powerful, intense, rewarding, and challenging year for me. It had more in store for me than I could realize and I came out the other end feeling more comfortable and capable in many ways--deeper in my self-understanding and grounded in my choices.  So what did the year entail?   The Start of the Year January began with the passing of my spouse's grandmother, Shirley, which included a week of lots of hospital visits, a few overnight vigils, and finally, her passing in her home. Though sad, she also died peacefully in her home surrounded by family, which at past 90 years, is something we could all wish for.  The experience had echoes of my own father passing in its progression and the kind of decisions and care needed. I think that helped me be a level of support and insight that hel...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Photo by  Adi Goldstein  on  Unsplash It's time for one of those--"hot dang, we hit a milestone, let's celebrate!  We've gone from my first post in March, 2010 (when this blog was called The Hitchhiking Adjunct--thank you very much, Douglas Adams!) to a rebranding into By Any Other Nerd  in 2012 since I was not long full-time adjuncting.  That year, I also hit my 100th blog post and it would be only 3 years till I hit my 1001th post .  Three years later, I made it to my 1500th blog post and today, 5 years after that, I'm sharing my 2000th blog post.  Somewhere in between there, I did celebrate my blog being 10 years old as well.  Today--well, it's a teenager--yikes. The majority of social media projects (blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, etc) usually don't last more than 6 months (at least, that's one of those things I've read over the years and it feels right based upon my experience).  Somehow, I'...

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 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 t...

So 2020 will mark the 10th year of blogging.  This here is the 1679th post, which means I averaged about 167 posts a year since starting this blog in March 2010 (originally named "The Hitchhiking Adjunct").  Some posts were obviously more substantial than others.  And a good portion of them were reprinting what I had written elsewhere.  Of course, there were the ones that were part of a year-long series such as when I did the 365 Short Stories and 365 Photos projects .   This past year, the posts have been a bit less than usual, to say the least.  I've published about 60 or so posts, most of which have largely consistent of reprints, reviews ( which I first posted to GoodReads ), and pieces that I had written previously (e.g. the PhD Chronicles were written in 2018 and the Mudty Relations essay series was mostly written in 2018).  There's been a variety of reasons for this including it being busier with different projects and work (make e...

So this is my 1500th post.  My 1001th post   was published just over 2.25 years ago.  Not a bad milestone for a blog that's been around since 2010.  Numerically, that works out to about 187 blog posts a year.  Of course, that average is misinformed since there were 2 years where I did a minimum of a post of day (that would be my Photo A Day Project and my Short Story a Day Project ).   A Look Back This post, like so many others, is an opportunity to reflect and I'd like to spend some time hitting some of my highlights and thoughts about this little slice of the Internet where I park my thoughts.   In looking at that first year,  my first blog post is not much to talk about.  It is the essential "hello, world" blog post.  And we can see by my second blog post that I'm still dawdling a bit.  My third post isn't even worth mentioning (except I did).  But I would say, by my fourth post , I'm heading...

It's been a busy year.  A year that included a job change, a move, submitting significant pieces of my dissertation, taking 6 classes in a doctoral program, working full time, being a present partner, and just the usual challenges of life.  The dynamics of such a year I think resonate with what I see as some of the best posts of this past year in blogging. Now I qualify "best" here in two ways.  1.  The ways in which I felt engaged with the posts that I created.  2. The comments people shared with me about how the posts made them feel or think.  I would say that like in years past, I took a few risks in some of what I wrote about this year.  Not so much that I put myself in jeopardy but that I made myself a bit more vulnerable.  I've certainly done that in the past but I feel like some of these posts helped me to push myself further in this regard.  Anyways, feel free to check out the highlights and let me know what you thought were among m...

In my first blog post in this series , we took a look as some of the ways you might approach blogging.  In this post, we're going to look at some of the more technical features and some things you should do with your post.  Now, I say should and all I really mean by that is if you want to maximize your viewership, there are definitely some things I recommend.  Blogging Platform But first, let's talk about platforms.  There are a bajillion blogging platforms out there.  This blog runs on Blogger .  But there's also WordPress and Tumblr and many others.  Platforms matter and while I chose Blogger because I am a heavy Google-product user, if I had a time machine, I would go back and choose WordPress.  Largely I recommend WordPress because it has better SEO (what is "SEO"--search engine optimization, which basically means, it gets better positioning in search results.  You would think Blogger does but apparently, it's WordPress.  I would ...

I’ve been blogging here for about six years ( here's my very first blog post ).  I’ve come to really enjoy it and find it a useful means of exploring different ideas, sharing interesting things, and engaging in occasional dialogue.  I’ve had a variety of ideas about why I blog over the years but have largely settled into blogging as a practice of writing and reflecting for myself and if others join me—hey, that’s great! In fact, it's taken years to figure what my blog is about and how to best use it.  It’s largely about coming up with prompts for myself—which to the general reader is probably a bit eclectic:  what I'm reading, things I'm seeing (wow--now that I think about it, that's pretty boring--oh well, I still enjoy the act of blogging).   Getting Started...or Not The hardest part of any blog has been keeping it going.  Most blogs die quick, lonely deaths in the first months of their creation. I stumbled a lot with my blog in the first ...

So here it is--my 1001th post.  I'm pretty proud of myself that I made it into blogging this far.  I started it 5 years ago and am still going strong.  In fact, it was less than 3 years ago, that I was celebrating my 200th blog post, so that should tell you something about how much I've taken to blogging.  In fact, I've been pretty impressed in that I get about 10,000 hits a month.  I consider that to be pretty good for a blog that is just a miscellany of my mind.   While I liked the early years, it's really been the last three years wherein I pushed to challenge myself to regularly write and produce on my blog through 365 Projects and that's helped immensely in getting over the 1000 threshold.   In looking at my most popular posts, only one of them comes from before the 365 projects.  In fact, there's the breakdown: Zero Hour by Ray Bradbury The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket by Yasunari Kawabata The Sequel, Remake, Redux Edition Th...