Blogiversary

Blogiversaries are a good time for reflection, time to ask ourselves what we're doing here in front of the keyboard in our pajamas (OK, sometimes it's true) while the floors go unswept and the to-do lists grow longer. Mine is coming up on Oct. 29, and on my first day, I wrote "This is an experiment, to find out if I have anything to say." I changed the blog name after that (I'll stick with this one), the design sometime later (it'll change again if I ever get time), and the abiding topic a number of times after that.

I've done the quizzes, cast about for topics, gone link-fishing; I've written posts that I thought were important contributions to the discussion (of one thing or another) and others that I expected just to be an off-site storage for something I wanted to keep. I've learned some HTML and some Photoshop and have written for publication more or less every day. Overall, what I've gained from blogging is more valuable to me than the time I've put into it that I "should" have used for other things.

I've been interested in my readers, all 6,048 of them -- where they come from, why (if) they come back, whether they find my stuff too long, too short, too boring, too time-consuming, too ponderous, too frivolous, too pious, too irreverent (probably alternately all of the above) -- what they're looking for and whether they find it. Some are my face-to-face friends who want, for some reason, to know what I'm thinking about today. Others are in distant cities and check in frequently, and their return is more of a compliment than I can describe.

I got my first comment spam last week and deleted it with real pleasure; it was the passing of a milestone (for bigger bloggers, managing spam comments is probably more like the passing of a kidney stone, but I'm not there yet).

But the left side of this site--the blogroll--gives me more day-to-day pleasure than the right, so over the next week or few, I'll introduce the bloggers I read and why. I'll go alphabetically, so as not to miss anyone.