Reflections on One Year Of Blogging, and Some Changes...

I've had a website related to my book for at least 10 years, but it was always a pain to update. About a year ago, I looked for a more modern content management solution, and found Squarespace. With Squarespace, it's easy to update things, and also to keep a blog, which I figured I would use to notify people when I had something new on the site. As usual, we never know where things will lead, and I've now written more than 200 blog posts, and according to Squarespace, I've had more than 30,000 unique (non-robot) visitors from over 100 countries (including Iran!) in the last year! (Google Analytics, which I've used since September, says closer to 11,000, but even that number is surprising to me.)

I've pretty much just written about whatever I found interesting, and I've never worried too much about trying to be timely, although sometimes I'll spread posts out over a few days (the posts with an exact time (like this one) I've usually written in advance). The three biggest traffic peaks have been when I criticized the quality of live concert sound (which got close to 1,000 visitors, and I still have a lot more to say on that topic when I get caught up), posted pictures I took of the new F train (over 1,000 visitors to that page and counting), and then last month my "Seeing Sound Waves" video, which has now, amazingly to me, drawn more than 4,000 visitors. And it's been interesting, watching the search referrals, I've learned that posts can have a long life--I've seen people finding things I posted months earlier.

In addition to writing about entertainment technology, I've been posting things here about my life to let friends know what I've been up to (I've sent out a year-end letter for over 25 years now for the same reason, this past year there were many links from the letter to the blog). But recently, Facebook (which I've been on for years) hit critical mass with my friends (oh, those embarrassing photos from college!), and so, moving forward, I'll post the off-topic personal stuff there, unless I think I have something that might be interesting to a broader audience (see upcoming post on Wednesday), or that I want people to be able to find through a public search.

This should lead to more on-topic posts, but it will likely mean a few less posts overall. So, rather than checking back to see if anything's new, I suggest that you subscribe to my feed using a reader like Google Reader (if you don't know what I'm talking about, watch this little one minute video on feeds).  Or, you can follow me on Twitter.  Although I don't post much there directly, post titles from here feed there (and then to Facebook).  That way, if I do post something timely, you won't miss it, and you won't get bored checking in when I haven't posted anything and, worst of all, stop checking in. Seeing that people are coming to the site is what keeps me going, and it's all been a lot of fun.  As long as the fun lasts, I'll continue posting and please, if you have any comments, let me know!