It has been twenty years since I started blogging on this web-site and elsewhere. Initially, I used to post separately on this web-site, on Advogato, and on BlogSpot. After a while, I consolidated all my blog-posts on this web-site, as there was no clear separation of themes for the posts across these platforms and it was simpler to have a single soap-box. Over the years I started posting more and more, but ultimately the posts have become a sad trickle, mostly about book-reviews and the odd ICFP Contest in which I took part. I should really fix this by posting more regularly and on more diverse topics.
My first post on 2001-03-30 was about a major redesign of my web-site to adopt a weblog-style for the main content, based on the apparent feedback from a certain “Bianca Broussard” (who soon turned out to be a fake person trying to promote the services of a company named Xanga). In the early days, the blog-posts did not have their own standalone web-page (for example, see a snapshot from May 2001 here, thanks to The Wayback Machine). In 2008, I reorganized this web-site to have per-post standalone pages for being able to link to each blog-post separately and for the faster loading of aggregator pages. I also provided a feed based on the Atom format so that regular readers, if any, could easily get notified of new blog-posts as and when they appeared.
To see how I have been faring over the years, here is a graph showing the number of blog-posts I have published in each year:
As an alternate view, here is an activity-calendar till the end of last year in reverse chronological order (which I have now incorporated into the main archives page):
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| Legend: | ||||||||||||
As can be seen above, I used to be a fairly regular blogger till about 2011, after which the posting-frequency dropped quite a bit. In recent years, there has been some mid-year activity due to the ICFP Contest and some year-end activity due to book-reading.
The primary reason for the sharp drop-off after 2011 is that I started using Twitter for publishing casual thoughts (since it was as low-friction as BlogSpot and Advogato, unlike publishing to this web-site). I also started reading many more long-form articles with the help of Feedly and Pocket, as well as spending more time reading Hacker News – this left me with much less time for reading books. To redeem myself, I scramble to finish reading at least a couple of books during my usual year-end break, so that it does not turn out to be a shameful year in which I did not read even a single book.
This is obviously not healthy and also diminishes the value of this web-site to its precious few visitors. I have resolved again and again to remedy this by posting around once a week on a range of topics, but have not succeeded so far. Dare I hope that things would start becoming better from this year? Let us see.