Today is the third anniversary of this blog.
It is now three years since I started
Notes from underground on 28 November 2005, and in that time there have been 741 published posts (this is the 742nd).
This wasn't by any means my first online blog or journal.
I atarted an online journal at DearDiary at the beginning of the new millennium
I was then invited by Bishop Seraphim Sigrist to join
LiveJournal, which I still use as a journal for personal events and happenings.
I then discovered Blogger, and started a blog here, because the Blogger software was specifically designed from blogging rather than journalling. The distinction between blogging and journalling is rather fuzzy nowadays, but a blog, or web log, is still basically a commentary on things one finds on the web, and Blogger had the "Blog this" feature that made it easy to link to web sites and comment on them.
Then Google took over Blogger, and introduced a new beta version of the software, in which many of the features, including "Blog this", no longer worked. At that point, from about October 2006, many Blogger users began moving to WordPress, and when more and more things in Blogger were broken, I myself started a WordPress blog,
Khanya, in February 2007, in case it became necessary to move.
At first the Khanya blog was just experimental, just to see what could be done with it, but I began using it more and more, as Blogger remained crippled. Then about a year ago Blogger began to improve again, and many of the features like "Blog this" began working again.
So now I have two main blogs, which I use about equally. This one,
Notes from underground, I still use mainly as a blog proper, to comment on other web sites, because the "Blog this" feature makes it easy. So if there is a distinction, this blog is more for news commentary, while
Khanya is more for articles and ideas. But the distinction is not by any means absolute, and the choice of which blog I put something in is often determined not by subject matter, but by which one makes it technically easiest to accomplish whatever I want to do.
A lot of stuff that would previously have gone into my LiveJournal now also goes into this blog or
Khanya, because they include pictures directly, while
LiveJournal only allows one to link to pictures uploaded to a third-party site like Photobucket, which makes it more of a hassle to include pictures.
One thing that seems strange, however, is that even though I use this blog and
Khanya interchangeably, the
Khanya blog, on WordPress, always seems to attract more readers, as the following graph from
Amatomu shows:
And that's in spite of the fact that this blog has been going almost twice as long as the
Khanya one, and should thus have been able to gather more readers.
Anyway, it's now three years old, and I wonder if it (or I) will still be around after another three years.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who has read it and commented on the posts over the last few years. It's the comments that make blogging worthwhile, and help one to see whether ideas are worth pursuing or not. Well, perhaps I should qualify that by saying
intelligent comments. Spam comments, and other comments that have nothing to do with the post and so add nothing to the subject, are worse than useless.