Day: December 4, 2007

At Last, a 393rd Post!

~ Liam ~ Leave a comment

A year ago today I began Panorama of the Mountains with my first post. The 365 days since then have been quite memorable including the birth of my first child and moving to a new home. Writing this blog is a distant third for the most significant aspect of the past year. I’ve really enjoyed the outlet for writing and sharing ideas (in fact, I get rather antsy when I don’t have a chance to write for a while). It’s also been educational to read and learn from the various blogs and feeds over there in the blogroll. While the conversation has not been as active as I’d hoped, I still get a thrill every time someone posts a comment.

According to WordPress, these are my stats:

Blog Stats

Total Views: 14,474

Best Day Ever: 249

Totals

Posts: 392

Comments: 464 (most of those are probably me)

Spam: 7,209 (egads!)

For some reason my review of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil has an inordinate number of views throughout it’s lifetime despite the fact that it’s not a very good post (nor a very good book). Lately a lot of people are finding a tribute to Jose Reyes’ great month of April through Google Image Search. Not exactly how I expected the world would be looking at me, but I’ll take what I can get.

That being said, here are my personal favorite posts from the past years:

Now that I’m a veteran blogger, I have some goals for the coming year. I’d like to increase the quality of this blog as opposed to the great quantity of posts. Here are some ideas I have:

  • Politics – when I first envisioned this blog, I thought it would be an outlet for my views on politics and current events, but that has not materialized. Partially because I find others more eloquent about expressing political views, partially because I fear getting flamed, and partially because I don’t want my own rash hotheadedness to end up on a public forum, I’ve avoided making political posts. I think though that I should make an effort to speak my voice on the issues more often.
  • Commenting elsewhere – I complain that no one ever comments, but then I don’t comment elsewhere on other people’s blogs. If I reach out, I can make the conversation happen.
  • Original material – I’d like to post more original writing, including some fiction, as opposed to just rehashing things I read elsewhere.
  • Sub-blogs – Panorama of the Mountains is named because it is a mix of all the aspects of my life. Still, sometimes I think I should break off some topics into separate blogs. I’m not sure how possible it would be for me to maintain multiple blogs, but these are the sub-blogs I’m considering launching over the next year.
    • Librarianship – as a means of professional growth and networking, I think an all-library blog seperated from all the stuff about my personal life would be a good idea.
    • Mets – an all-Mets blog from the unique perspective of a fan in New England (maybe enlisting other fans in the Mets diaspora to help out).
    • Faith – one man’s witness to faith, religion, and Catholic spirituality.
    • Bicycle commuter – there are not many blogs out there for bicycle commuters and I think I’d offer a unique urban American experience.
  • No more big “link dumps” where I try to weave together a month’s worth of links into some coherent narrative. From now on I’ll just post “Link of the day for…” like everyone else does.
  • History – I’d like to use this blog for exploring historical topics online and some original historical research.

I hope anyone reading is enjoying this blog, and if you have any suggestions for improvement, let me hear them. And if you’re not blogging, but want to try it out, here are some thoughts about blogging from Librarian Place. C’mon in and give it a try.

Now I have to go and catch up on all those half-finished posts from November.