19th anniversary celebration badge label in golden color
Image by starline on Freepik
Every year for what seems like a long time, I’ve been quietly mourning the “death of the blog”, which vanished from most peoples’ awareness as just one of the old fashioned things we used to do online before social media ate everything. And yet blogging isn’t really dead, it’s just mostly dead. The good folks at Substack figured out that there were enough good writers — and more importantly, people willing to pay money to read the work of those writers — who didn’t want to put up with bait-and-switch headlines, toxic auto-start video ads, and all the rest of the visual and audio garbage so many “mainstream” sites were extruding.
Unlike the many interesting writers on Substack, I’ve never really used my blog for much in the way of original writing, concentrating more on interesting stuff from others that I wanted to share … I guess that’s what most people started using social media for, until they realized that social media is really intended to hurl insults at those heretics who don’t agree with you 1,000% on every last detail of your political beliefs.
I used to post some rudimentary statistics about blog traffic, but it turned out that the antiquated plug-in I was relying on hadn’t been patched in several years and when it had had enough of gathering stats, it blowed up real good, taking the entire site offline for more than a day before I could get it back online. These days, the WordPress stats indicate a much smaller level of traffic, although the time visitors spend on the blog seems to be getting a bit longer.
Earlier anniversary postings:
- Eighteenth anniversary
- Seventeenth anniversary
- Sixteenth anniversary
- Fifteenth anniversary
- Fourteenth anniversary
- Thirteenth anniversary
- Twelfth anniversary
- Eleventh anniversary
- Tenth anniversary
- Ninth anniversary
- Eighth anniversary
- Seventh anniversary
- Sixth anniversary
Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon P’s site … and eventually consuming some 90+% of his paid bandwidth and storage — aren’t accessible any more, at least I haven’t been able to get access for quite some time:
- (Very belated) Fifth anniversary
- (Premature) Fourth anniversary (a few days later, I welcomed my 150,000th visitor)
- Third anniversary
- (Belated) Second anniversary
- First anniversary
