whydoitweet

After 1 year and 3 days, it's time for a brief look back from different perspectives.

The Timeline

Before I joined Coil, I had not blogged for quite a while. I think the last blog I ran was on a now-defunct website called notaboutme.nl about 8 years ago, and I spent most of my effort writing music reviews and roleplaying-game related content. I stopped blogging mainly because life took over, and because I always did struggle to blog at a consistent pace, and build up a community.

But one year ago I changed my mind, and made a very careful start with this blog. It's a choice I don't regret at all, but initially I was rather hesitant to start a personal blog, primarily due to fear of confusing the boundaries between professional and personal lives.

In the early months, I gained traction quite quickly, and especially the Small Sims series attracted a lot of attention. The posts, which were partially inspired by my work, actually fed back into work as well, as I sometimes pointed students to the posts to help them a bit with getting to grips with code. My favorite one is #7 on elections by the way, which I guess could even be relevant for the upcoming US election?

The Game World series has been one that I enjoyed writing the most, as it gave me a new way to share the experiences I built up through about two decades personal experience of world development (both in writing and in code). I do believe it can be much better than it currently is, but there is ample time to polish it and supplement it in the coming years :).

In 2020, the output was more variable, and more in line with how I normally produce things (very much in waves, instead of having a constant stream). A post about appraising your assumptions from February is worth mentioning, but what I ended up getting the most traction with was my voluntary reviews of Covid-19 simulation codes. It led to me being invited to write two pieces for the Conversation, and I ended up participating in a whole range of efforts to help mitigate the pandemic.

When the UK came out of lockdown in late spring, I ran out of gas in many areas, but fortunately it manifested itself more in loss of physical productivity than a loss of mental well-being. And then, over the summer, I had a large wave of posts in June/July before taking it a bit easier again this month :).

The Numbers

Here you go, a list of all posts by categories along with the number of upvotes for each installment:

My general-interest, tech and politics posts are popular while Small Sims, Boffins Office and the Fork are not so popular. And lastly, almost nobody cared about my “Special Week in December” coverage, so I suppose that week was not so special after all...

My top post got only 13 up votes, but a large number of my posts end up with 4 up votes or more. This leads me to conclude that among Coil subscribers, I'm a bit of a niche hit with a narrow but dedicated readership.

I also shared a Coil Blog Survey a while ago, which you can fill in whenever you like. That survey got four responses in total, with two people especially appreciating Blast from the Past and Coil posts, and one person specifically enjoying the diversity in posts :).

Of course, the Coil Boost also provides further numerical input, but in terms of analysis it is not so directly useful. This is because I suspect there is a large but unknown delay between when posts are made, and when they are processed for Coil Boost calculations (unless my August month with three posts really was four times as awesome as my July month with 10+ posts ;)).

The Current View

I am very happy to have gone down this path, and I am grateful that Coil established this platform, and that the XRP community signposted me to it (I think it was Hodor actually who caused me to find it initially...). Many of the Coil posts have been useful to share and discuss with existing friends, as I could easily signpost them to my opinions by referring to the posts.

But moreover, I made a bunch of new online friends via Coil, I got inspired by many of the topics that I decided to write about, and I realise that many of my creative outbursts that would otherwise have gone lost are now nicely preserved on this blog. So I have 0 regret having gone down this path, and look forward on how this will grow in the second year :).

Image courtesy of *publicdomainpictures.net*.

The Future

As for that second year, I already shared some thoughts on that in my previous post. But on the whole, expect me to post all across the board, at somewhat irregular intervals, and to spin off a new project or two in due time.

A part of me is keen to move this blog to an external website (still hooked up with Coil), but I think that it still may be too early to do that now, as any time spent moving is probably not really worth it at this stage :).

But what I do expect to do is to build more and more automated scripts. Not only for tiles, but perhaps also for images adorning my blog posts, for example...

Credits

Header image courtesy of pixabay.

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