My relationship with WordPress.com has officially reached the age of a tween. In another year, it could register on Tumblr!

Besides being inextricably linked to my career with Automattic, WordPress.com has been important to me. It’s the largest multi-site of the open source project, WordPress, which is very cool. In fact, being a very, very, very tiny part of contributing to a more open web is a big honor for me, and something I feel very strongly about, ethically. My online home has been my WP.com blog for more than a decade, and it’s provided me with a release and a chance to reason through things I can’t seem to any other way. It’s also been a diary of my kids’ lives, and a wonderful treasure trove of memories – it’s amazing what you can forget when you’re busy! With my blog, the days have been short and also the years have been short. I suppose time really does fly when you’re having fun!

I’m not the most active blogger by a country mile, but I am proud of my blogging habit, and having the time and space to explore what works best for me. One thing that’s great is that my habit can flex and evolve over time, with no downside. If something works for a long time (like, posting every day), that’s great! And when it no longer works well, I can just try something different.

In twelve years, I’ve made more than 2,300 posts. 2022 has so far only contributed 101 posts to the total (this is 102, actually!). I’ve committed more than 30,000 words to this blog, this year. In total in twelve years, I’ve written nearly 300,000 words here. By contrast, I’ve written more than 700,000 words on work blogs (P2) in 9 1/2 years. My first two years of blogging here I got zero likes! None! I also only made 62 posts in total.

I noticed that in January and February of this year, I was posting frequently – I participated in Bloganuary, which sent me daily posting prompts and that was fun. It felt good to blog regularly, so I kept it up most of the way through February. Then my work shifted, and I was hyperfocused on Tumblr in a way that meant I posted less – maybe three times a week, versus every day. Things picked up again in April, then fell off again in May and June, which matches the intensity of other work I’m doing. I feel like I’m posting tons less than “usual” but the reality shows that I’m posting far more than I did in the latter half of last year. From July – Dec of 2021, I posted on average 6 times a month. In the first half of this year, I’ve posted on average 16 times a month. So I suppose it’s all perspective. I think this year, I’ve felt more of a yearning to post more, but have felt otherwise too busy. And at the end of last year, I felt more at loose ends, with nothing much to say. In 2020 and 2021 I posted only 6 times per month on average over both years – it was a pretty low period, with COVID and homeschooling and our entire lives being disrupted. Now I feel productive and happy, and I think that shows up in my blogging habit pretty clearly. I wonder what the next 12 months will hold in terms of my blog – new theme, new topics, or more of the same? Not knowing is part of the fun, and I’m here to have fun.