A post! I’m writing a post! I’m publishing a post! It’ll be a very small one, but I need to publish something.

We bought our house back in September, and for the first three months my energy has been devoted to the process of ripping it apart and putting it back together as a home. It’s not really done –the stairs are still raw plywood– but it’s beyond the point of needing my all-consuming attention. It’s been past that point for a while, and though I’ve turned my attention to blogging I just…haven’t…sat…

It takes me about ten hours to write a blog post. I thought that if I wrote something a little more personal that didn’t need research I could turn something faster. Four hours later and that post is still in my draft bin, with at least another six hours of attention required before it’ll be fit for other eyes. This post today mightn’t be much, but it’s fast, and it’s a little step towards getting myself on screen and accountable again. It gives me a reason to do that bad thing of returning to my blog dashboard again and again for the hit of a few new views. And in returning to my blog and spending time on it again, I’m getting myself back into the swing of scheduling some life this way and returning to my regularly scheduled programming.

One thing that’s I’ve been surprised by is that traffic through this blog has been pretty steady, even in my absence.

I’m not entirely convinced that those visits are not just bots sweeping the web for a sucker, since the views are often of random posts even when from the same “visitor.” But given how dead traffic to my blog has been for the previous three years, does this mean that mere longevity is moving my blog to a different category in the database algorithms?

Oh well. The random clicks aren’t particularly interesting to me since they don’t provide feedback. Sometimes I can take a guess by the timing and origin of a view that there is a real person on the other side who actually follows my blog. (Hi Pakistan friend!) But I do enjoy seeing my world map get colored in. Here’s my map for 2020, and all the countries (and VPNs) from which a person or bot has viewed my page.

And that’s the trivial but fun kind of carrot that helps reward me in this blog. I hope this year that I might hear from some of you!

(Time to write this: 1.5 hrs.)