Right now is the 3.141592654th anniversary of the Evil Eyebrow. The first post went up at May 18, 2005, 12:39 pm and this one hits on July 8, 23:16 PM. I know that it’s typical to celebrate the blogiversary, however I forgot about it this year. I have the opportunity now to celebrate the Pi-iversary, which makes me geekily gleeful.
Blogging, by most measures, is about 10 years old. Blogging as most people look at it today is about 5 years old. How much longer will this thing last? Who knows? I think it has some good legs, though. The systems might change and the type of content may get more sophisticated but the architecture of the “blog” is robust for what it does: it provides a 21st century journal and pundit-stand to anyone who wants one.
Personally, I’ve written more in the past 3.14 years than I ever did in a paper journal. I positively hate writing long hand. My handwriting is poor, I don’t even remember how to write in cursive anymore and my words-to-page rate is so low compared to typing that it is mentally painful to write letters. Of course, a lot of blogs, including this one, are less about journaling than random thought spewage into the internet. I try to keep the Eyebrow light and airy when it comes to personal matters. Sure, I talk about things I’m doing, etc., but I don’t get into the nitty gritty of my life and the people within it. In that sense, this blog has never been a journal. Mostly, as I just mentioned, it’s a place where I can keep people up to date about things I’ve run across, pictures I’ve taken, places I’ve been, movies I’ve watched, runs I’ve ran, races I’ve raced, books I’ve read, and anything else that comes to my attention, like penis-shaped candy.
Is this a useful application of my time? Probably not. I’m not solving the world hunger issue, nor am I contributing materially to my career, but it’s certainly fun and enjoyable and that’s why I do it. If I didn’t like it, I’d stop. So, happy Piiversary, Evil Eyebrow! It’s been a good 3.14 years.
Now that I’ve gotten the teary stuff out of the way, how about some statistics? Unfortunately, I’ve just now discovered that I forgot to include the Google Analytics script when I changed up my theme, as you can see from the graph.
Looking back at the blog history since I started using Google Analytics, you can see some interesting things.
August 2, 2007 was a spike. I’m pretty sure that was due to my post about the I-35 Bridge collapse. The others for that day or days before don’t seem nearly so visit-magnetic. The other big spike was on June 13, 2007 and I honestly don’t know why. The posts on or before that date don’t seem very relevant. Hmmm…
Traffic has been growing, slowly, with a big uptick in 2008. I’m up around 23 unique visitors per day, which is cool. Perhaps that will get bigger. I suspect that I need to be doing something generally useful to the community to make that happen. Content content content, as they say. But to get back to what I was saying about doing this because I enjoy it, I’m not a traffic whore. I get who I get, which includes a bunch of my friends from other places, and that makes me plenty happy. Don’t get me wrong, if I figured out how to triple my traffic, I would, and turn this website into a nice social networking blog, but that’s not a primary goal.
Another interesting compilation of random stuff are these word clouds of the blog. (Thanks to Wordle for providing such a slick interface for composing these clouds.)
This first one is every single Post Title as of last week. You can see that I had a lot of “Favorite Photo of the Week” and “This Week in Traffic” titles. Apparently, I also talked about Harry Potter a lot.
This one is the textual content of the blog since its inception. Every single word displayed on screen within the posts, not including titles. Jenn (my wife!) was a bit miffed that her name displayed smaller than both “Harry” and “Potter”. What can I say, this isn’t a journal. Sorry, sweetie (Jenn), I’ll try (Jenn) to do better for the pi times e-iversary on December 1, 2013 at 2:18 PM.
