Celebrating 800 Posts!

Today marks my 800th post. Hard to believe I reached that milestone!

I want to thank all of you who subscribe to the blog, stop by frequently to read my posts, and to those of you who post comments and share your thoughts.

When I started blogging over five years ago, I never thought I would publish 800 posts.

And I never dreamed I would commit to writing and publishing every day, as I have for the past year.

The Beginning

This blog started on Posterous, with my first post published in October 2009.

An easy-to-use blogging platform, Posterous had the tagline:

Posting is dead simple.

Posterous made it easy for you to create your blog in seconds. All you needed was an email address to post images, text, videos, photo galleries—whatever type of content you wanted to share.

You didn’t need to know any code. Posterous took care of automatically formatting your content correctly. What could be simpler?

And if you didn’t want to, you never had to log in to Posterous.

One email message sent to Posterous could update your blog, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and your other social network accounts.

In the early days of my blog, I wrote about technology, social media, and shared recaps of the newly launched Higher Ed Live weekly livestream shows for those of us working in higher education.

I liked Posterous so much that I wrote a guide on how to use Posterous to create a blog, set up your account, tag content, add multimedia, manage content, and find/follow other Posterous bloggers.

The Move

Unfortunately, Posterous eventually shut down after Twitter bought the company in March 2012. I moved my blog to Lireo Designs before the Posterous service officially closed in April 2013.

It wasn’t an easy experience migrating the content first to WordPress.com and then to this site.

I learned a lot about WordPress exports/imports and what happens when images aren’t included in the export.

And I personally understood how my clients felt when things don’t automatically transfer the way you expect.

Once I moved my blog to this site, I increased my writing to include a weekly web design and development resource roundup, something I continue to this day.

My goal was to provide a weekly collection of resources for my fellow web workers—resources I read and found helpful, and thought others would find useful for their web projects.

I expanded my posts to include tutorials and background about my interests: accessibility, WordPress, user experience, security, and online privacy.

And I decided to share a more personal side of me with a photo of the week from the various places I visit.

In November 2013, I signed up for National Blog Posting Month. Along with thousands of other bloggers, I committed to publishing daily.

I have to say it was challenging to create content every day. If you have never participated in a month-long blogging commitment, I recommend it.

It works wonders to help you to set your goals, organize your ideas, plan posts, and write regularly.

And having other people doing the same thing, commenting on your posts, and encouraging you to write is amazing!

A Daily Habit

After the 2013 end-of-year holiday break, I decided if I could post daily for a month, why not commit to post daily for a year?

I had a list of blog post ideas and I quickly set up my editorial calendar for the posts.

My social media followers graciously shared my posts and I began to see visitors from all over the world visiting the blog. Several people asked for posts about specific topics. I thought, this is pretty exciting!

I’ll never forget last April when visitor traffic started spiking on the site. What could be happening? I wondered.

Turned out my recap post, Responsive HTML Emails from the RWD Summit 2014 Conference, was included in the Responsive Design Weekly newsletter.

That day was the most visited day of the year on the blog.

What’s Next?

And that brings us to today.

Eight hundred posts in just over five years.

Along the way, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting amazing people online, people I would never had come to know, if it wasn’t for blogging.

It’s been great fun and I plan to continue blogging. I thank you all for joining me!