Happy Birthday to me! One year blogiversary

A post to mark one year of blogging. Where has the time gone!?

This week marks one year since I first bought a hosting plan from SiteGround* (yes, it’s an affiliate link) and published my first blog post. Crazy how time flies!

In that time I’ve written 40 blog posts, and have a few more half-finished lying in my drafts folder. That works out at a little less than one per week. Looking at the archives, I started strong with several posts per month, but am currently languishing at 1-2 posts per month!

At first I set myself the challenge of posting twice a week, but quickly found that to be way too difficult to keep up with. I’ve decided that, seeing as I’m mostly writing this for me and my own entertainment, I wasn’t going to be beholden to any schedule. If I felt like writing then I’d sit and bash something out, but if I didn’t, then no worries.

Apparently the average lifespan of a blog is 3 months. After that, most bloggers tend to lose interest and the blog falls by the wayside. You can see a similar pattern in my own archives! What’s interesting and surprising though, is that I’ve been feeling a renewed interest in blogging over the last few weeks. I have more ideas of things to write than I do time in which to write them all!

Favourite posts

My favourite posts over the last year are:

• Is a PhD compatible with Financial Independence?
• Financial lessons from unlikely places: Video Games
• The importance of diversification

Looking over these posts has reminded me of the fun that I can derive from writing something completely original. Don’t get me wrong, I like the monthly reports that I and many other bloggers post each month. I think they can contain a lot of useful information, and it’s always interesting to delve into the lives of others! But having said that, there’s something about composing something from scratch that the monthly report doesn’t quite cover. I’ll take this as inspiration to try to write more of this style of post.

What I’ve learned

First of all, blogging is hard work! Writing a post takes me several hours. Getting to grips with how WordPress works was also not easy. Even now, if I want to do something new, there’s a lot of searching the internet and asking my fellow bloggers for help.

Despite those difficulties however, blogging has turned out to be more fun and interesting than I expected. Writing my thoughts on paper… err, the screen, is very useful, helping me to solidify my feelings on a subject.

Most importantly, the community is great. I’ve had a lot of fun over the last year interacting with various bloggers and commenters, whether on twitter, someone else’s blog or my own. Furthermore, I’ve had my eyes opened to a range of different topics that I wouldn’t have had without this blog.

What does the future hold?

I still have at two years left on my hosting plan (they offered a discount!), so you’re all stuck with me for at least that long. As I’ve written above, I’ve enjoyed blogging a lot over the past year, so intend to continue for the foreseeable future.

For those who have discovered my blog and keep coming back, thank you! As much as I say that this blogging malarkey is primarily for myself, I can’t deny that I get a small hit of dopamine when someone comments on the blog.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this blog, and have maybe found some useful tidbits here and there. Here’s to another year of blogging!