An anniversary blew past me recently. On November 11, 2024, this blog quietly (so quietly that it was unbeknownst to me!) celebrated its 10th anniversary.
I have been blogging for 18 years, since September 8, 2006, when I started my first blog, called Filter & Splice, on Blogger. I love that each blog post is dated, and I can easily find the first post on each blog using the archive feature.
On October 23, 2007, I redirected folks to my new blog, The Woo Woo Teacup Journal. My last post on that blog was November 23, 2014, when I redirected readers here.
As you can see from those dates, I seem to have a penchant for creating new blogs around autumn. I’ve kept several other blogs that were more focused than Filter & Splice, The Woo Woo Teacup Journal, and Without Obligation, but only one of those was started around the same time of year.
Strangely, I felt like I had kept The Woo Woo Teacup Journal (WWTJ) longer than Without Obligation (which first started with my name as the title), so to see that Without Obligation is now 10, as compared to the 7 years I kept WWTJ is a surprise. Where did the time go?
My first post on Without Obligation was called “Show Your Work!” and was inspired by artist and writer Austin Kleon.
I have written 557 posts here. (This one should make 558.) This includes the posts I rolled into this site from my blog The Pragmatic Historian. I found it was too difficult to keep two blogs, so combined them, which was its own challenge. You can still find those posts by doing a search for ‘pragmatic historian.’
I can’t tell you how many visitors I’ve had since starting Without Obligation because I ditched the Jetpack plugin that tracked that sort of thing for several years. I reinstalled it in 2020 and have seen my stats grow from year-to-year. In 2024, I had 14,795 visitors. It feels good to know that people are reading this blog.
Aside from my home page, my most popular posts are as follows:
How to Add Album Images in Musicolet App
Hey, Dude, I’m Not Sure You Understand Your Bumper Sticker (this was a sleeper hit around the 2024 election for some reason)
What To Do With Three Handmade Baptism Gowns?
People really like those bog coat posts!
Though I’m happy to have posts that people connect with, I feel a little sad for the posts that have only had 1 visitor. There are quite a few with 1 visitor, although I see that a number of those are from The Pragmatic Historian. Rolling those posts into Without Obligation probably deleted all the stats, and they were never revisited after their initial post on the old blog. (I am terrible about sharing posts more than once.)
Here is one post that only had 1 visitor, but it seems appropriate upon the 10th anniversary of Without Obligation:
The Importance of the Year – or Decade – in Review
Happy belated anniversary, oh, blog of mine! Let’s see how long we can keep this going.
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Happy Blog birthday! And congratulations – not many people can claim this many years blogging.
Thanks, Liz! 🙂