This blog has existed in various forms, with a few breaks, since March 2005. There might even have been earlier versions of this blog, but probably in the form of some cringey “personal website”, as they were all the rage from 2000-2005, before blogs were a thing.

Since I didn’t really blog much the last few years, I took my blog offline for a while. Reasons for that are varied, one of them is that I was definitely too busy with other things in my life, and another is that WordPress has become a UX nightmare for the casual blogger. But recently I felt like I would like to have a place for my thoughts again that is not Instagram or Twitter or anything like that. That’s why I decided to set it up again using ClassicPress, the old school, uncluttered version of WordPress. Re-activating my blog made me delve into my archives (mostly to deactivate a ton of cringey old posts), and I took this opportunity to quantify my blog a little. Quantifying data is one of those things that kept me too busy for blogging the past few years 🙂

There are currently a total of 989 posts in the archives of this blog. Yes, you read that right! Now if you’re wondering why you can’t find that many while browsing here, it’s because a whopping 90% of this blog’s posts are hidden from the public, because honestly, nobody wants to read what I wrote in my daily ramblings between 2005 and 2007 (ish). So in fact, there are currently only 91 blog posts that may be actually read available on this blog.

What does this look like in comparison? Well the following chart shows the publicly available posts:

There are notable spikes in 2013, when apparently I felt very enthusiastic about reviewing TV shows and movies, and in 2015 when I participated in a “one blog post per day” challenge during September. Then since 2017 there’s pretty much nothing… probably because I started my PhD and was too preoccupied writing academic texts instead of blog posts.

Well, what about all those hidden depths? The following chart shows all posts that are hiding in the database (and will definitely never surface again):

This shows that I used to blog an insane amount from 2005 until around 2007… this notably decreased around the time Twitter and other social networks became a thing, and pretty much killed blogging. Why bother to blog when you can just quickly post something on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc? Also, let’s not forget another major factor in the death of blogging, the death of Google Reader.

One thing that also really took the fun out of blogging was the fact that comments died. Back in the good ol’ days, people used to write comments on your blog posts, which definitely increased the fun in blogging. But once people starting using social media, this slowly died out, because then people would write their comments (if any) on the Facebook or Twitter post that advertised your blog post, rather than on the blog itself – with the sad consequence that these are now forever lost in the abyss of social media. This chart shows the amount of comments I had on my blog per year:

Wow, in 2007 my blog had a total of 879 comments on 203 posts! That’s pretty much unimaginable today! Those were the days! Today pretty much nobody comments anymore, thanks to other social media platforms and people having become to accustomed to just “liking” posts, rather than taking their time to think and write something.

Well I hope you enjoyed this little journey into the past! I hope that maybe I will blog a bit more again in the future, or at least cross-post some of the more memorable (for me) stuff that I would usually post on some other platform here. And maybe I’ll even give this blog a new layout some day, when I feel like digging through the never-ending mess of spaghetti code that WordPress themes have become.

(These stats were brought to you mainly via MySQL queries. If you would like to do this as well, you can find these queries here.)