Reflecting on 10 years of blogging

On September 14th 2020, this blog celebrated its 10th birthday. Blogging for 10 years makes me something like a dinosaur left over from the days when blogging for the sake of blogging was more popular than now. If I count my previous blogs and websites, I’ve been writing on the internet for 20 years.

I wanted to make an ordered list here of the 10 main things I’ve learned from blogging in this space for the past 10 years, but I’ve taken a more organic, meandering approach. This blog developed in an organic and meandering way, and I want to keep this post in the atmosphere of the blog itself.

This blog is not as popular as it used to be. If I consider page counts, then this blog is dying out. Sometimes I wonder if the dropping stats mean that it’s time to pull the plug on this project. But I started blogging for myself, and I still enjoy looking through old pages and reflect back on my journey.

This blog hasn’t changed layout since 2013. I should move this blog over to wordpress, turn the page into a professional site*, learn to make some money from it and get overall a new layout. In theory, that is. In reality, I just don’t feel like. I like writing, and the rest doesn’t interest me so much. I’ve learned from all these years of blogging that it’s writing that I like, and writing for the purpose of reflection on my work. Maybe some day my interests will change, and I will clean up house here and get a nice 21st-century-style layout.

I started blogging when I was a second year PhD student. I’m a professor with tenure at two universities now. It’s nice to look back at times to see how far I’ve come. For that reason, I still post presentations and papers. I also feel that this is part of “reporting” on what I did to make tenure twice, and what my particular path has been.

When I started off, I focused on giving advice. By now, I still give advice, and especially in my posts for AcademicTransfer – but at the same time, I’ve created more space here to reflect: to reflect on my semesters, my goals, and just current state of my work and life in general. Even though I blog under my personal name, I feel safe enough to write about myself and my work.

Will I still be blogging in 10 years from now? Time will tell – but until then, allow me to celebrate that I’ve been sticking with this blog and this writing for 10 years.

* I ended up doing this – I hired somebody to move my mammoth blog over to WordPress and design the site. I was so much in a funk with this blog  that I put myself to make a choice: improve things and spice them up again, or pull the plug out of the project.