In Year Seven things start to repeat

January 24, 2023

When the calendar turned to 2023 it marked the beginning of year seven for this blog.

There are times when I review my all the posts I’ve written and shake my head. How in the world did I come up with nearly 300 topics in the past six years?

Here are the statistics:

• 298 unique Tuesday Newsday posts
• Longest Post: 1,598 words
• Shortest Post: 164 words
• Approximate average length per post: 1, 017 words
• Approximate number of words written: 303,066

Statistics are, for normal people, kind of boring. But I decided I wanted to find, in particular, my longest and shortest posts and to get a feel for just how much I have written.

First, the longest post. This surprised me a bit. It was an article about the band Bachman, Turner, Overdrive (BTO). Now, one of the things I write about in that blog post is the fact that I was never a Mega BTO fan… which factored into an encounter with one of their band members in 1995. Of course, you SHOULD probably click on this link and go read all about it. It’s still a great story. In my humble opinion. https://barbaradevore.com/2021/11/09/bachman-turner-overdrive/

The shortest blog post is, ironically, from January 24, 2017. It was only the second post I ever wrote. The reason it’s so short is that I was still finding my blog ‘voice’ at that point. I recall looking for a topic to write about and couldn’t find anything which inspired a personal connection. So I wrote about Sutter’s Mill. I’ve never been to Sutter’s Mill. I discovered that I didn’t even reference the Infallible Wikipedia for that article. Likely the only time I haven’t. It’s a very lame article but for full transparency, here’s the link: https://barbaradevore.com/2017/01/24/thars-gold-in-them-there-hills/

Back in the early days I was wildly inconsistent. Which is why I have posts for ‘some’ Tuesdays in January and February of that year and not for others. By March 2017, however, I hit my stride and the posts poured forth.

Now here we are, in 2023, and the term BLOG is ubiquitous; everyone knows what it means, more or less. But that hasn’t always been the case. In fact blogging wasn’t invented until 1997. Yes, there is an Infallible Wikipedia article about it:

“The term ‘weblog’ was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The short form, ‘blog’, was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used ‘blog’ as both a noun and verb (‘to blog’, meaning ‘to edit one’s weblog or to post to one’s weblog’) and devised the term ‘blogger’ in connection with Pyra Labs’ Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.”

Finally, for all my faithful followers, you may have just noticed that I turned my formula upside down by sharing my personal story first and the Infallible Wikipedia second.

It’s good to shake things up every once in a while and keep everyone guessing! And for those keeping track, this blog post is 547 words. You’re welcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog