877 Blog Posts in 2013

During the past few weeks, I've been interested to see how many of the genealogies bloggers have referred to their top 10 or whatever blog posts during the past year. This seems to be some sort of tradition among journalists, to give a recap of the top 10 stories at the end of each year. My problem is that looking at the top 10 blog posts simply by the number of responses of the readers is embarrassing. My prime example is my all time most favorite blog post which currently shows almost 40,000 views happens to be a knock off, two paragraph mention of a correction to a previous post.

Introspectively,  I would suppose that most bloggers are interested in the reasons why some blog posts are popular and others seem to fall flat. From my own personal experience, looking at the statistics the reasons seem to defy analysis. For example, I can write two blog posts on exactly the same subject and the second post on the same subject can have two or three times as many readers as the first post. This makes no sense to me. On the other hand, it is really easy for me to predict which blog posts will be ignored completely. It is usually those posts that involve announcements of programs or events that are otherwise abundantly covered in the blogging community. My two cents worth is not worth two cents. I've also noticed that my tirades seem to garner more attention than my serious research efforts. What does that tell me about blogging community?

Well, last year I wrote 877 blog posts. Now, if I had started out the year with the goal to write 877 blog posts I think I would have been terminally discouraged. That averages out to 2.4 per day. (I have no idea how I would write a .4 blog post). 2013 was challenging for the variety of topics that became interesting during the year. Whenever I got discouraged about coming up with new topics it seemed like there was always something that happened to reverse that trend almost immediately. Of course, from an overall perspective throwing out a number like 877 is nothing more or less than a challenge to the blogging community. I'm sure there are some of you out there who will feel discouraged because you only turned out 500 blog posts. I'm also sure there are some who will take this as a challenge and try to write more than 877 blog posts in 2014. To give a small measure of consolation, I might note that I am running only at the rate of 2.2 blog posts per day so far in 2014 for Genealogy's Star. However, if you take into account the fact that I am writing blog posts for the website Answers.com, which I was not doing during 2013, and if you add in the number that I have already written so far this year for that website, and if you add in the blog posts I have done for other websites such as my new Rejoice and be exceeding glad blog, I am presently running at the rate of 4.2 blog posts per day Which would put me at over 1500 blog posts during 2014.

 Oh, oh, I should not have figured that out. Maybe I should just write all of those in the first month and take the rest of the year off? Hmm.  If I stay up all night and don't eat, I think I can do it.