100

I'd forgotten that I started this blog at the beginning of February last year.  I thought that since I post twice a week (minimum), my 100^th post would be closer to that year mark.  Then I remembered that two-month hiatus I took from my blog last year—the worst sin you can commit if blogging is important to you at all.  On the web, infrequent updates lead to a bored and frustrated audience, which in turn leads to no audience.

And the audience is important to me.  I know I have a few friends who keep up with this blog, and certainly my mother (the only family member who cares; I know for a fact my siblings don’t.)  Thanks, guys.

I made a discovery last month which completely made my blog so much cooler for me.  For a while, I ignored my stats.  I was happy to see that people were looking at my blog, but I didn’t want the numbers to control my happiness in any way, for or against.  Finally, I succumbed, mostly because I wanted to see what some of the buttons on my blog page do.  One of them, I get to look at where my audience is from, and what I saw blew me away: recently, my blog is not most read by my friends and family.  In fact, most of my audience isn’t in the United States at all.  I have an audience who reads from the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany.

I don’t know what brought you to check out my page or why you keep coming back week after week, but it is very flattering and I want to thank you as well.  That was awesome to see.

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I reread my first post, entitled “What to Expect from Me.”  It’s a rambling mission statement with the chief virtue of being short (although maybe not short enough.)  I looked back to see how I did.

And with the exception hiatus, I have kept true to updating twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, and that is something I plan to continue.  I also mentioned the subjects I expected to write about, and some of those have happened and others didn’t.  If nothing else, I always have written about my interests.

When I started this blog, I used the OSC Reviews Everything column as my model.  After all, I’m not getting paid to do this so why shouldn’t a write only about the things I care about?  Nobody is twisting my arm to see a movie I don’t care about or listen to music that makes me want to drive a spike through my ears.  And while I don’t cover the spectrum Card does (he wrote an entire article on toilet paper once) I have had the variety of musings.  So much so I worry week after week that I’m going to run out of things to talk about.

This next year, I am going to try something new with weekends.  Saturdays are reserved for my 1,001 Novels on that list, only to be updated whenever I finish the books or decide they’re not worth my time.  But last month, I did a special on a Sunday talk I gave and you know, I enjoyed that so much that it’s something I want to keep doing.  I’m reserving the second Sunday of each month to post on any gospel-related subject that has caught my attention.

And in closing, the last paragraph in “What to Expect from Me” explained the meaning behind my blog’s title.  It still applies.  If I can’t find the silver lining behind anything I discuss, you are free to call me on it.