It's been about a year since this site has been located at ddhr.org.  And I only really started "blogging" (as the young kids call it) in March of 2005.  Looking back on my site, it's kind of interesting to see how things changed.  This site used to be located at daveinc.net and used to consist solely of plain text.  Eventually I started hard-coding "blog posts" and turning my site into a trendy little blog.  Shortly after that, I started using Blogger to power my blog because hard-coding was a little tedious, especially with frequent style changes.  I discovered WordPress at an excellent free host, though I initially didn't believe it could be legitimate.  I struggled through the downtimes and template rebuilding with Blogger for only a few short months before I moved to WordPress.  Eventually, I got rid of the "blog" section of my site and moved all the posts to the main page, while also converting all the former static files into WordPress pages. 

Some of my earlier posts were truly written with the idea that no one would ever read them.  That's really the way they should all be (like I recently decided).  But people keep finding my site accidentally, so I sometimes try to keep other people's feelings in mind (a little, though obviously not very much).  But even the structure of my earlier posts was different.  They had long and/or nondescript titles.  The content was sort of unfocused and didn't really have a beginning or end.  The topics were edgier and I didn't hold much back.  As time went on, posts became a little bit more organized, [I think] they were better written, and spell-check was used profusely (though Google doesn't have a grammar checker ... yet).  It's true that a website is never officially complete, but I think that idea applies to more than just the formatting. 

Some interesting trends came and went.  When I first started in March and April of 2005, I only posted about once per day.  I was afraid I'd run out of things to write, so I wanted to space everything out.  May was a slow month, but the summer followed a pretty steady pattern.  In September, I had more than twice as many posts as August because I introduced a couple new categories:  links and pictures.  The fall of 2005 continued with this pattern as I read more and more websites and came up with "interesting" things to write about.  I continued to post more and more things each day as I got over my fear of running out of things to write.  My biggest month of posting was in January of 2006.  Why?  Because my employer blocked access to my website.  It's like that whole thing with voting:  If people don't have the right to vote, they want it.  I didn't have the ability to blog, so I wanted it.  In January I also upgraded to WordPress 2.0 (which started a string of posts, problems, corrections, etc.) and I started the updates category to announce new plugins and major (or minor) site changes.  In February, I quietly moved past the 500 mark in total number of posts, and in April, I reached 600. 

All in all, this little experiment in technology/writing/thinking/tinkering is proving to be bigger and more rewarding than I had expected.  Like my current sidebar says, "When I'm not talking, I'm thinking.  These are the results.  It turns out that I have something to say about everything.  When all else fails and you're out of other options, continue reading."  And when I'm done coming up with things to write, I'll just stop.  Until then, happy trails.