The Blog at Two Years: A Look Back

12/02/2005 15:53 Filed in: Miscellaneous
Two years ago I started blogging. Originally, it wasn't This Lamp. Rather it was "Rick's Blog: Religion, Technology, Books, Movies and Politics (and this This Lamp...and that's all I need...)," which as I've explained before was a play on a line from Steve Martin's movie, The Jerk. My goal was not to focus on just one area, but on all the areas listed above, but unapologetically from the viewpoint of a Christian worldview. A number of really good blogs that I read regularly are purposefully very focused. In doing this their writers find their own niche. Although I've been tempted to do that at times, I still desire to keep that potpourri-style approach to my writing. It fits my personality, I believe.

If you look back on my entry on this day last year ("The Blog at One Year"), you'll see I noted that I had written 55 blogs that first year which met my goal (at least based on averages) to write one blog per week. Well, how did I compare with number of blogs in the second year? Drum roll please... This is the 177th blog I've written which means that I wrote 122 entries in year two, more than twice the number of my first year. Lately, I've been creating one or more posts everyday, but I don't ever anticipate writing the kind of blog that has multiple entries added all day long. I don't have anything against that kind of blog; I just don't have that kind of time! But who knows. If I wrote 55 entries the first year, and 122 the second year, who knows... maybe I'll write 250 the third year.

Also, in the past couple of weeks, I reached the 10,000th mark in hits which seems to be the unofficial mark that a blog is really starting to get read. However, truth be told, it hit that mark sometime back. I actually didn't add a counter to the blog until about 10 months into the first year. I literally had no clue at the time how many hits I already had received. But since I could set the counter at a starting point, I pulled a number totally out of the air and set it at 769 hits. Based on the rate it began to rise, I would guess that I should have set it a few thousand hits higher. Regardless, the blog has been getting a bit more attention lately as it has gained a wider audience. In the early days, and for perhaps more than its first year of existence, my blog was read primarily by family and friends. Lately I've received a number of emails from people all over the globe who have found it through other means as I've tried to take it to a wider audience.

Another new feature in the last few months was the addition of guest blogs from some of my friends. I like this idea because not only does it increase the aspect of variety in my blog, but it also gives others to test the waters of writing a blog of their own.

In the last few weeks, I took the tagline and made it the main line switching from "Rick's Blog" to "This Lamp" which I believe gives my blog a bit more distinction. I was pleased that the domain name THISLAMP.COM was not yet taken, so now that is the fastest way to find this page. Another change came last month as I completely switched software and combined my blog with other pages of my website using the highly recommended software, RapidWeaver.

Writing is, without doubt, a creative outlet for me, and I hope you get at least some percentage of the pleasure reading it that I do writing it. Thanks for coming here, and thanks for contributing through guest blogs, or in the comments, or through private emails.

Keep watching this space...