The year 2022 somehow marked my ninth year blogging on WordPress. In that time, I’ve published posts 2,321 times, and of those posts, 347 came in 2022. As you may remember, I had a streak of 300-plus consecutive days of posting to the blog, with the streak starting in December 2021 and ending in October 2022. After that, I was more spotty with my blogging. Nonetheless, I’m humbled to have reached 40,000 views for the year, a little more than a 1,000 views more than the prior year. Not that I’m “chasing it,” but incidentally, that’s still below my high watermark in 2014 of 41,889. I had 31,000 visitors to the blog in 2022, with the United States being the predominant country of origin, obviously, with 25,180 views; the United Kingdom at 2,856 views; Canada at 2,232 views; India at 1,263 views; and Australia at 1,070 views to round out the top five. I’ve also been fortunate to amass 1,143 people who subscribe to my blog for updates. Thank you for reading when you can!
What most astounds me is that in 2022 alone, I wrote 338,100 words. The reason such a number astounds me is that I was excited to write to 50,000 words in November for National Novel Writing Month! But I suppose in being fair to myself, 50,000 words on one project versus 338,100 words spread out across 347 blog posts is quite a different situation, or about 974 words per post.
Even though I did 347 new posts in 2022, because of SEO, or search engine optimization (posts from past years are still searchable and thus, accessible!), only one cracked my top 10 most viewed posts in 2022: Dateline NBC’s Podcast: The Seduction with 1,437 views. I am happy to see that in the top three was my Home page/Archives page itself at 2,796 views. As last year, my post, the Fatal Flaw in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was among the most viewed posts at number two, with 2,949 views. And as for number one, seemingly in an apropos way, is my post about Mary Oliver’s Poem, “The Uses of Sorrow” at 3,629 views.
My posts tend to cover the gambit of “musings” available to me, from haiku poems to five-line poems to film, television and book reviews, to deeper, more philosophical and/or self-reflective issues I’m thinking about spurned on by whatever happens across my brain at that moment, and then bringing it back to sillier items, there are always going to be posts like reviewing Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza. Heck, I even wrote my first fiction story in quite some time this year. Perhaps the most fun I had on the blog this year was reviewing all 10 episodes of House of the Dragon. If I had to pick a “favorite” post, which is rather self-indulgent, although I suppose this whole post is, then I’d go with … Depression: ‘Keep Busy With Survival’ (I only searched my blog going back to August, so, ya know.)
Anyhow, thank you all again for reading, and here’s to more blogging and musing in 2023!
Milam's Musings 