The practice of blogging: a decade of evolution

Ten years ago today, I started blogging. With only the haziest understanding of the medium, I posted Not the Naughties, an essay I'd already written and polished. Unsure how to proceed, I sought advice and found plenty of it. Be the expert on a single topic! Monetize your blog! Establish it as part of your platform! When none of that resonated, I continued to go my own way, writing for the joy of it, and editing past posts that came up in my stats.

Soon I was using the blog to schedule posts and meet deadlines. I'd sketch them in roughly, then finish and and edit them before and after they went live. Soon I began to schedule posts in series, on a single topic. Meanwhile, having decided pictures were essential for this kind of short entry, I'd begun taking photos with future blog posts in mind. My new iphone had a great camera, and I used it to illustrate my posts.

Back then, I worked exclusively on a desktop computer -- writing about anything that inspired words. I kept a notebook in the car, one in my purse, and one by my bed. When an idea struck, I'd scribble a note, then develop a post later.

The first entry I posted while away from my home computer was inspired by my reaction to a novel by Khaled Hosseini. As soon I finished the book (in a very long queue at Heathrow Airport), I felt compelled to write down the thoughts that were tumbling around in my head. Settled in at the Penn Club, I lined up to use the single shared computer the hostelry had recently installed beside the clunky old pay phone. The next time I checked in to my London Club, I had my laptop.

Since that early post about Hosseini's book, I've posted 548 other commentaries on books. I follow no rules, but use my current reading obsessions to comment on books that spark a special resonance. Some of these have been published decades before, and some express the voices of wonderful new writers who keep me on the reading edge.

Looking back at my stats, I note the posts that got the most hits. In 2013, following a visit to Lethbridge, my post about Ammolite garnered 4500 views. A post on Chauvet cave in France (2011) was seen over 3500 times, and one on the late and wonderful writer Richard Wagamese (2013) got 2000 views, and continues to get hits today. The next most popular was one about a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. What am I to make of this? I used to wonder, but now I just use my energy to write and edit, keeping in tune with a practice that hones my skills and soothes me.