Blogging For 22 Years

This site went online on 12/31/1995, so it's going to be 22 years old. Like most things as they grow up, they get more risk averse, and let's just be honest here, more boring. However, 2017 seems to have been much busier than 2016.

Posts in 2016 - 37
Posts in 2017 - 43 counting this one

Unique Visitors in 2016 - 20,787
Visits in 2016 - 40,683
Unique Visitors in 2017 - 75,523
Visits in 2017 - 124,379
Most Popular posts in 2017

A three year old post on college scholarships just edged out The Great Facebook Unfollowing.

I guess that scholarship post must have been linked somewhere - but I don't know where. Not using Google Analytics means I have limited data, as Google doesn't share most of that data with my web server. It's worth it though, as ODonnellWeb is one site where neither Google or Facebook is tracking you.

I have no idea why traffic is up so much. It's constant across every month, which leads me to believe that it's either a real increase in traffic, or Awstats changed how it tracks visits.

¯\(ツ)/¯

So what's on tap for 2018 here? I could probably just use another shruggie, as I have no idea. I've all but abandoned Facebook as a publishing platform, using it only to post the occasional "I'm still alive" photo when doing something moderately interesting. Twitter is a dumpster fire, and I think often I should drop it too. I've never really used it for anything but short form snark anyway, so it doesn't really impact this site.

What I'd really like to see is a resurgence of the independent web. I feel like we all know social media is bad for us, and bad for society. However, individual expression is good. I'd love to see an uptick in the number of people publishing to a traditional blog, or publishing photos to Google Photos and Twitter instead of Facebook and Instagram. I didn't quite hit one blog post a week last year, so maybe I'll aim for that in 2018.

Who wants to join me in bringing back the independent blog?

I also have the newsletter. It ended up replacing my blog in Q4 of 2017, which was never the intent. Writing the newsletter feels more intimate than writing here, even though in reality the content is very similar. Maybe it'll be a little more personal, with the posts here being a little more public. I've still got a couple of days to figure it out :)

I'll see y'all in 2018.

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