I need to find a new reason for blogging. See, I recently realised that I’m not blogging for the sake of the writing. I started blogging as an escape from studies, a career and a life that was going nowhere. I started blogging because I was unhappy, and being silly and meeting new people online helped me forget that. I started blogging as a distraction.
For that same reason I started volunteering in the WordPress.com forums, but quickly came to love it and, one day late in 2015, decided to make a career out of it. And that’s how I came to be a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.
The most commented post was On the day job with 46 total comments.
As of today if all else fails… has 539 followers and the Facebook page has 45.
And I’ve answered over 8,750 threads on the WordPress.com support forums (5,000 of those before I started getting paid to do it).
Looking back on it like this I realise it’s been a great 4 years blogging on WordPress.com. I’ve met some great people and made quite a few friends around the world. To all of you, thanks for joining me in this journey and making it worthwhile with your comments, your post likes, your encouragement when I posted about going through tough spots, and your sharing in my joy when I celebrated the good things in my life.
And it’s that time of the year again where blogs across WordPress.com are invaded by fireworks.
I’ll forgive you if you skip this – I hardly expect you to obsess over my stats – but I’m posting it here for easy reference for my own sake.
Short version: total views are up, in spite of number of posts being less than half of last year. The number of countries visited has also gone up, and the map on my stats page had several new spots filled in this year.
Thanks to all of you who kept reading, sharing and commenting. I hope you’ll keep doing that in 2016. Blogging isn’t any fun if you do it in isolation, after all 🙂
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Remember when I posted about getting our car back two months ago? At the end I joked that a job offer was all that was needed to make my birthday week complete.
What I didn’t mention was that I had applied for a job just a few days earlier, and in fact I got an email inviting me to an interview a mere sixteen minutes after my birthday ended at midnight a day after that post.
Two interviews, a five-week trial period and another interview later, and today I started working for…
if all else fails...use a hammer 