3,000 blog posts!

This is the 3,000th blog post I've published on this site! Bloody hell!

I first started a blog on Blogger.com in 2004 - twenty years ago. Like all blogs, I managed half a dozen posts before I forgot about it.

Cut to 2007 and I decided to launch shkspr.mobi as a weird site dedicated to rendering Shakespeare's plays in txt spk. Judging by Archive.org I was still using Blogger.

By 2008 I was blogging most months. And then I never really stopped. In early 2009 I switched to WordPress which led me down the path of developing my own theme and plugins.

Along the way, I've added necroposts - blog posts from work blogs which have since become defunct, or letters that I wrote to magazines when I was a kid.

I've also been quite liberal with my use of retroposts - posts written far in advance and then published once the dust has settled. There are a few more of those in the pipeline.

As of today, there are about 6,500 pieces of media in my library - taking up 2.3GB.

Last year I hit 12,000 comments - now I'm on about 13,500.

Since 2009, when I first turned on WordPress stats, my blog has been visited 8.5 million times.

According to some code I copy and pasted the total wordcount across all my posts is...

1,553,953 words.

Bloody hell!

So, because bloggers like nothing more than writing about blogging, I thought I'd do a little look behind my process.

How I write

I don't write every day. But I do write most days. I usually write title and scraps of ideas, then leave them to ferment⁰. They usually start out as social-media posts which have got a little traction.

When I do write a post, I'll quite often leave it in a half-finished state and come back to it later. I usually have several blog posts on the go at any one time. It is incredibly rare that I'll write something and publish it that same day. And it is only occasionally that I publish something in the same week it was written.

I schedule and reschedule as the mood takes me.

I write in MarkDown using the classic editor. I'm too stuck in my ways to switch to Gutenberg blocks.

Why I write

Because I enjoy it.

Someone once asked me how I managed to read so many books and the answer is simple - because I prefer reading books to doing other things.

I could spend more time playing video games, or learning to solder, or cooking from scratch, or brewing beer, or drinking beer, or any of a thousand hobbies¹. But reading and writing are what I prefer doing.

Oh, sure, there's a thrill when a post goes viral. Or when someone you admire says something nice about the writing. Or when someone leaves a comment on an old blog saying how I helped them. Or when I'm cited in academic research.

But the reason I write is to get all the ideas out of my head². I blog daily because, deep down, I want to learn something new and surprising every day - and I want to share that with anyone who happens to pass by.

What I've learned

It is trite, but the blog posts I expected to be lauded were mostly flops. The half-arsed ones often do well³.

People can't read. I'll write as clearly as I can and some yutz will misunderstand me⁴.

Some people are incapable of understanding hyperbole. Perhaps it is a feature of British English which isn't well understood around the world?

Americans don't like swearing in blog posts and get a bit po-faced about it⁵.

My predictions rarely come true, my opinions fluctuate, and my spelling remains poor.

I'm nothing without my unpaid editor.

Thank you for reading

I mostly write for me. But it is lovely to know that people all around the world occasionally stop by to read. It is very sweet of you.

If you've enjoyed my writing or ever found it useful, please go off and start your own blog. Write whatever nonsense comes into your head.