Friends, I encourage you to publish more, indirectly meaning you should write more and then share it.

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

It’s a real gift to see my friends post stuff online. Go post more!

Many of these kinds of retrospectives contain graphs of views over time or the most popular posts; but I’m not showing it to you because I can’t—I don’t keep any statistics whatsoever.

I don’t really care—and I don’t want to care—about how many readers I have or what posts are and aren’t popular. I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.

If I were chasing views I would certainly not have continued to blog for as long as I have, and I’d have missed out on the many benefits I’ve gotten from the blog.

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.

I do thoroughly enjoy when people reach out and tell me they read the blog, but I don’t share things here for the social clout.

I share things on here because the act of curating thoughts through the writing process brings me so much joy and clarity.

I’ve been meaning to write something longer form on here for a while, but all my good long thoughts have been sent to Monkey Wrench.

But this post made me reflect on my own blogging journey. I started blogging in a LiveJournal at some point in the early 2000s. I bought my own domain and moved my thoughts over there in 2004. I blogged from a pseudonym starting in 2006 up through college. I bought this domain while sitting in a TV production class my senior year of college and started a fresh blog.

It’s been a while since I burned the stack to the ground and started fresh, but ever since I started building websites for a living, it stopped being fun to do it in my free time.

If you’re a painter, you’re still allowed to paint landscapes. Singers are still allowed to sing about love. And heck — I’m betting the first time your critic learned about this particular topic, he wasn’t standing atop Mount Sinai. Knowledge transfer is a vital human activity, and it’s all about synthesizing, refining, and incrementally expanding on what’s been said before.

Here’s a short list of posts I’ve been wanting to write but have chickened out every time I start a draft:

• How I’ve organized my Plex music library
• How to pick the perfect karaoke song
• Ways you can move out of the corporate world and into the startup world
• Why I stopped reading the news and quit social media
• How to avoid clickbait articles

Maybe I should force myself to write one of these and publish it with little self-editing.

I made a concerted effort to write more this year. I’ve journaled roughly 98% of the days this year, and I’ve published something on this blog just as much. I even started a newsletter.

I’ve learned a lot about myself thanks to all of this writing. I didn’t realize how much a daily blogging challenge would reveal about my musical tastes. I wouldn’t have been able to identify my feelings without yelling at a journal until my voice became hoarse.

Best of all, writing is proving to be an effective way for me to share what I’ve learned with others. Feeling useful helps beat back the depression demons.

I encourage anyone reading this to write down whatever you’ve been interested in lately and post it somewhere. Share it with me so I can learn with you!

But I will share the Google Analytics graph below that I pulled tonight — mostly because it makes me happy and maybe it will inspire some of you to stick with it. Remember, the flatline you see early on in 2006 is basically what things looked like from 2004 until that point.

Inspiring post from MG Siegler. Be sure to check that graph out.

Wait, you guys don't think I'm lame, do you?