The Blog is a Year Old

I wrote my first blog post just over a year ago, on March 3, 2010. This is my 67^th post, so I've been cranking them out at the rate of one every six days since then.

Some have been slightly shorter, some longer than 500 hundred words, but I try to stay close. This one is exactly 500 words.

I've written about politics, economics, travel, cocktails, daily life, Kurt Browning – anything that interested me and that I was just bursting to tell someone about. I've tried to inform, explain, persuade, praise, question, criticize, and ridicule. Sometimes I just needed to vent. Sometimes I tried to be funny.

Some posts have been easy to write, the work of half an hour. Others have taken days and many rewrites. Some I never published. One or two, I took down after posting them briefly. If you're thinking about writing your own blog, here's a tip: don't drink and blog.

I've know I've made some mistakes and I not every post was a winner, but there are a few that I particularly enjoyed writing and am proud of. I think I've improved as a writer, but you're a better judge of that than I am.

There have been nearly 3,000 visits to the blog, about 60 a week, and I know many of you are family and friends who return regularly. Thank you for your support and encouragement.

As you might expect, the majority (about 70%) of my readers are from Canada, with the U.S. taking the number 2 spot. After that, there are a few surprises: Germany, Russia, and the Netherlands round out the top 5, followed by the U.K., South Africa, Kuwait, China, and Taiwan. There have been visitors from Malaysia, India, Philippines, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Ghana, Slovenia, Venezuela, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates. I don't know who you are, or how you found me, but thank you for dropping in. You're always welcome. And feel free to bring your friends; there's lots of room.

At the bottom of the post, you'll find an icon of an envelope with a right-pointing arrow. Click on that to forward to a friend (or enemy). There are other icons there, too, for doing social media-type things that I don't really understand, but if you do, go ahead.

I'd love it if you'd leave a comment. People seem to have no trouble doing so if they're a follower, but other comments don't seem to make it through unless posted anonymously. Keep trying.

A year ago, I invited you to be my audience, to give me 500 words to say what I had to say in the hope that you'd find it interesting. When I started, I had no idea how long I could keep it up, but it seems I haven't run out of things to say yet. I hope you'll stick around.

Yours sincerely,

Aeneas