Ten year anniversary

I started blogging ten years ago, on June 28, 2008. My first post was not even a real post--it was a link to a bit of humor I had on my website about how I raised gas prices. My first blog was not Rensselaer Adventures but rather Cybereconomics. I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to do by blogging, but my daughter had started a blog and her decision prompted me to do the same.

I started the Rensselaer Adventures blog in September. I do not remember why I started it, but I suspect that I had found that I wanted to limit my posting on the Cybereconomics blog to items that were somehow connected to economics and have a different place for items that were only of local interest. The number of posts on the Cybereconomics blog peaked in 2009 and then faded away, with the most recent post there nearly two years ago. When I began the Rensselaer Adventures blog, I moved over several items from the Cybereconomics blog and they were my first posts.

At the beginning my readership was only friends and acquaintances but readership slowly grew as more people discovered the blog. Google was one way people could find the blog--if they googled for a local topic I had covered, they might find the blog. In 2010 I tried to get more people to visit the blog by creating a Facebook page called Rensselaer Adventures and began to post a link to each blog post. The graph below, which gives monthly page views, shows that the number of visits to the blog increased until 2017. (Even though the graph does not include the months prior to June, 2010, there were visitors during those months.) Facebook referrals are the number one source of visitor traffic, with Google searches far behind. The downturn after 2017 may be partially due to the new way Facebook prioritizes what users see.

Below the graph is a list of the five most viewed posts to appear on the blog--flood pictures seem to be popular.

In the early years I tried to limit each post to one topic. I no longer do that and posts often jump from one topic to something completely unrelated. Hence, you cannot really tell what is in the post from the title. Content has drifted as my interest have changed. One huge change occurred in 2013 when I began to attend public meetings. Now without posts on meetings I would have little to write.

Blogging has been a fun adventure that has taken me to a lot of events that I otherwise would never have attended and allowed me meet a lot of people who I otherwise would never have met. I do not know how much longer the blog will remain alive, but I am 99.73% certain that I will not be writing about a twentieth year anniversary of blogging.