Tag Archives: milestones

Some reflections on reaching one million views on my blog today

Posted on October 23, 2021 | 2 comments

I started this blog on April 2007. After four years, it had reached 500,000 views. A decade later, it has reached a new milestone: a million views!

In the first four years, blogging was hot. I even had my blog featured on one of the blog roles on the New York Times. (It was a fluke, but it meant I got 500 views a day: now I average around 50 views.) In the last decade, blogging has been superseded many times by other online media, from twitter to TikToks. I use some of them, but I keep beavering away here too.

I have been steadily blogging for ten years, never knowing if I would reach this peak. Now that I have, I don’t know what I will do. Will I still blog every weekend and have them distributed throughout the week? Or will I just go with a random schedule? Will I move this off of WordPress and go to another platform and more effectively monetize the few popular posts I have? I don’t know. Something will change.

Meanwhile, I expect I will continue to blog. I like it. Maybe my next goal is 5000 posts. Or 250,000 visitors. We will see!

As always, thanks for reading this. I’ve been lucky to have thousands of people like you reading my posts a million times. That’s great, and greatly appreciated.

P.S. I’ve written a fair bit of blog posts about blogging. You can read them, here.

P.S.S. My favorites are here.

 

 

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On taking time off on your birthday

Posted on April 27, 2021 | 2 comments

Since I started work, decades ago, I have always taken the day off from work for my birthday. There are two good reasons for this:

  1. You get to celebrate and do things special things. I would often go to the Senator in downtown Toronto and have the fantastic breakfast they serve. Then I would roam around downtown and shop for things I love. I’d meet friends for lunch. Perhaps go to an afternoon movie or just go home and have a nap before the evening festivities. Whatever makes a great day, having the day off means you get to indulge in it.
  2. You get to avoid difficult things. Work is often difficult, and difficult things can spoil your birthday. If you have a great job then this isn’t such a problem. But if you have a demanding job, it’s hard to enjoy your birthday with all that. Best to take the day off!

The next time your birthday rolls around, I recommend you do the same. Tell people in advance, book off the time, and plan your own idea of a great day. You’ll be glad you did. It’s like a gift you give yourself.

This year I am celebrating a milestone birthday and am taking off the entire week! How old am I? The dog photo contains a hint. 🙂

Happy birthday for whenever your day is!

(Top photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash. Dog Photo by Glenn Han also on Unsplash)

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Some thoughts on my blog reaching half a million views

Posted on October 11, 2011 | 4 comments

Sometime last night my blog reached 500,000 views. I started it on April, 2007 as a way of getting away from sending interesting links to people via email. Simple as that.

I don’t really know if this is “good” or not. Certainly my views pale in comparison to premiere bloggers. I am sure even some of my peers easily surpass that. On the other hand, I know it can be difficult at first to get anyone to read your blog, and because of that, I am happy for all the people that have.

For me, I think it is a great milestone to reach. I had few expectations when I started the blog, other than I hoped that the people that I used to email links to would go and read them on my blog. Along the way, I was happy to be able to look back over what I blogged about a year or two ago and think: oh yeah, that happened! And while I don’t think I am a great writer, what I am happy for is that blogging on a regular basis has helped improved my writing and my thinking.

Most of the time I am trying to squeeze in a blog post among all the other things that I have to do at work and at home. There’s very little time for revisions and editing. Some of the longer posts have alot of effort poured into them, but most of the time, I think certain things are interesting and I’d like to share them with smart people I know. I am happy to see how many more smart people that I have come to know in the time since I started.

As always, thanks for reading this.

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