Twenty Years Of Blogging

The first post on this blog was made on July 3, 2005. In the first twenty years, I made 9,558 posts (an average of about 478 posts per year), and has generated 6,411 comments. This blog has been viewed 6,704,836 since tracking started on the site.

I also made 2,882 posts in that time period at sister blog "Dispatches At Turtle Island" and has generated 6,128 comments in those twenty years. It has had 3,073,337 views. 

Combined, I have made a combined 12,440 posts over twenty years, which is an average of 622 posts per year. The blogs have generated a combined 12,539 comments over those twenty years, which is an average of about 627 per year (both the posts and the comments omit posts and comments made after July 2, 2025). There have been a combined 9,778,173 views of the two blogs over twenty years, which is an average of about 1,339 per day.

Both blogs remain active. A third blogger blog, a serial novel I was working on, set in the near future, with the tentative name "Water Witch" is no longer active. If I were to start fresh today, I'd probably do so on the Substack platform, but I'm not bothered to migrate.

I have no illusions regarding its impact, although it did win one "Best of Denver" award from Westword. But it's still better than my previous habit of simply writing ideas down on scraps of paper and clipping physical newspaper articles and storing them in banker's boxes that no one but me could read.

Some of the writing that I would have done here in the early days has been replaced by posts on Facebook (which is especially suitable for short current events and politics oriented posts and for humor and connecting about personal life events with friends and family), posts on several Stack Exchange Forums (especially Law.SE and Politics.SE), and posts at the Physics Forum. I also comment regularly on a variety of other blogs and forums. 

In the early days, I made quite a few posts at DailyKos and dKospedia and several other online forums. For a while, I was a part-time professional journalist for the Colorado Independent (now defunct) where I wrote five to seven articles a week on a mostly law and politics and courts beat. 

I'm also a long time, moderate volume, continuing contributor to Wikipedia. And, of course, I've also kept a paper journal all of this time, not necessarily on a daily basis, where I record things like my weight, the books I've read, ideas generated when I don't have good access to a computer or don't want to make ideas public, and various other observations. I also write for my personal life in word processing files and Xcel spreadsheets, mostly about personal scientific theories that aren't solid enough to blog about, analysis of big data sets that I don't have a take on yet, and not particularly good fragmentary fictional sketches and fiction concept ideas written in one or two sessions and then let be. 

Obviously, as a lawyer, I have an ample annual output of professional written work of motion, briefs, trial preparation materials, notes from meetings and research, forms, and transactional practice instruments and contracts.

In those twenty years, my children have gone from being little kids, not yet in the first grade, to young adults who have finished college, found good jobs, found good significant others, and who have gotten their own apartments and health insurance. I had been married for ten years then, and now I've been married for thirty years. My kids are as old now as I was when I started this project.

On the whole, it's been a worthwhile hobby.