Peter M Howard ::

Ten Years

24Feb2014 [personal]

Quietly reached ten years of this website, just ten days ago. My first couple of posts showed up on Valentine’s Day 2004: the first a link to a Morning News piece; the second a link to an illustrator’s personal blog. Both sites are still there, but neither link works, the archives disappeared or restructured, the pieces that drew my attention now lost to time.

I no longer read either site, and nor has my little space on the internet followed the pattern set by those first two posts: before we re-badged self-publishing ‘blogging’, I was inspired by the community of writers sharing links and ideas. I wanted to be a part of that. But I’ve since discovered that it’s the reading and the writing I really love. I can’t maintain the discipline or the ritual of ‘link-blogging’, or the regularity required to develop any sort of following. But I’ve loved having my own little space to practice my writing, and to publish, even for no-one.

Curious, I went looking at my archives — I know my writing has come and gone here.

Ten years of posts and words

The orange line graphs the number of posts each month of the last ten years; the purple graphs the number of words. There are nearly three years worth of ‘months’ in which I posted nothing at all.

But still, a couple of interesting patterns. The big burst early on, having spent 2005 on exchange in France. The lonely burst in the first half of 2009 — predominantly my post On Chatter — a long-form piece that’s dated but still topical, and which somewhat appropriately talks to the virtues of short-form, which was to subsequently take over a lot of my writing. Since around the same time I’ve written a lot on Twitter instead of here. But then late 2010 / early 2011, and I’m back in France — writing the novel, and keeping a travel log while the words insist on flowing.

In the time since, this site has lain fallow again. A lot has changed, but then, the topics I’m interested in are still familiar, and when I take the time I enjoy the writing. So I’d say (not for the first time, nor the last!), expect to see more writing around here.

(Aside: in only my fourth post, I quoted from a comment against an interview with Paul Ford: “your fetish with the Semantic WEb is just an excuse not to organise your thoughts hierarchicly, as God intended”... This has in particular been front-of-mind again, as I delve into content strategy on a few different fronts, and discover again that nothing is ever really new!)

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