New Beginnings?

I hadn’t been planning on another post until Tuesday, when I’ll be sharing the compilation of the #NewYearSongOfTheDay that I have been posting on Twitter and this blog’s Facebook page. But then this one popped up in my Timehop feed. I had been thinking about doing a review post of my blogging 2018, and will probably do that in the next week or so, but I was quite taken with this review of my 2015, and thought I’d share it with you again. Very few of my current regular readers were with me back then, so I doubt that many of you will have seen this or the posts to which it links. Some of these are quite important for me, and I hope you dip into them and can see why.

WordPress has long since stopped providing the annual reports I mention in that post, although I have posted about blog statistics in the past year. My readership numbers have fallen since those days largely, as I mentioned, to the decline in links from BlogSurfer. I still keep it on my site, but I don’t think it does that much for me, to be honest! What is important for me is that three years ago I was remarking on the fact that I had just reached 200 followers: that figure is now well over 800 and continues to rise in a steady trickle. I’m not sure why many of you follow me, but I’m grateful that you do. And, as I said three years ago, the most satisfying aspect of this hobby of mine is the interaction it generates – it’s good to know there is someone out there!

As I write this, I can feel myself thinking those ‘end of year’ thoughts about where I want to go with my blog. I’m not sure that it has developed in quite the way I envisaged three years ago – there has been much less overtly about retirement than I had been intending – but I have some thoughts about what I should be doing in 2019, which I’ll share with you when I do that review of 2018. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this little glimpse back into my blogging past, and some of the posts I was writing back then. See you again soon 😊

Take It Easy

At this time of year everyone takes stock in some way. We look back at the past year and ask ourselves how it was for us, what we liked and didn’t like about it, what we could have done better, and what we have learned to take forward into next year and beyond. In doing so we have plenty of help from the media: those news reviews of the year on TV, the various end of year ‘awards’ pieces so beloved of newspaper and magazine columnists, and the (not) really uplifting montages of those public figureswho have died in the past year. I blog with WordPress (other blogging hosts are available) and each year they contribute to this by providingtheir authorswith a brief report on our blogging year. I have now had four of these and have opted to repost them here each year as a kind of record, as…

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