500 days of blogging dangerously

I started blogging on a dare. I wasn't sure how long I'd continue, or where blogging would take me. When I started blogging in November of 2009, it felt edgy to put my thoughts out there for all to see. What made it better was knowing I could always go back and edit.

At first I didn't commit to daily posts, but just waited till an idea flowed into my head, scribbled a note about it, and then posted as soon as I got to my computer.

My early efforts tended to be paper-oriented. Then I started to thrash out my ideas in Word documents and import them. Neither method worked very well either. Finally, I embraced the medium and began to compose in the blog space, rough drafts first which I could improve any time, either before or upon posting.

Editing a blog post proved to be quite different from editing print. Posts needed to be short, to have a visually appealing shape and more white space. Editing them, I enjoyed rephrasing to get rid of "orphans," words that were alone on a line. Illustrations helped too.

At some point, I began to wake up with ideas for posts, often on a Sunday, after a nice sleep-in. I'd go straight to the computer to enter them before forgetting.

When I noticed how one post idea frequently suggested others, I began to sketch in and schedule these ideas to be published later. In this way, daily editing became an integral part of the practice.

Sometimes my posts were related to places I'd been, or trips I'd taken, so I started to import my own pictures to illustrate my words. From writing for Suite 101, I'd learned how to add links, so when I didn't have the pictures I wanted, I found illustrations online, acknowledged their sources and linked to them. I linked to related sites as well.

The more I did that, I noticed, the more visitors I was getting. The idea that people were actually reading my words encouraged me to keep working to improve, and I began to do more research to add interesting tidbits of information to my posts.

Since beginning to track numbers in 2010, I've had hits from all continents (except Antarctica), countries large and small and about 1600 cities. I'll probably hit 20,000 page views by late November.

Of course, most visitors who read more than one page, and most repeat visitors are from English-speaking countries.

It's been an interesting journey. My current passion is a series of CanLit posts that start here. Back tomorrow with Michael Ondaatje.