I missed a rather important anniversary over the weekend. I just noticed that WordPress wished me a few days ago for being with them since 8 years. Of course, I’ve been writing since long before that, but most of my writing was read only by my family and the greatest achievement of my writing then was when my parents published my writing in a small book which they presented to me on my birthday. With blogging, I was still being read mostly by my family, but online and I had a sense of achievement in that I was hitting publish every time I completed a blog post, thereby putting it out there for everyone to read, if they so chose to.
My earliest blog is on wordpress.com here. I have tried a variety of platforms over time but WordPress just seems to be the right one for me. Of course, I left that blog some years ago and came to nitinkhanna.com (by way of blog.nitinkhanna.com) and self-hosted WordPress. But all that matters is that on-and-off, here-and-there, I was writing and I was publishing. I seem to have been able to average a post per month or so, though please don’t hold me to that standard (my last post here was more than a month ago and I’ve not had much to write in that intermediate time). But I am proud that I have a cumulative 1,37,361 words published on my blog (with some 66 posts sitting in drafts)
My writing style is highly personal and discursive since I write for myself and I don’t have an editor. Sometimes, I feel like writing while addressing you, the reader and sometimes I write-through some random thought I’ve been cultivating (those being the posts that are barely read). Some of my most successful posts have been tech posts such as this one about consoling to a network device from the OS X Terminal app using an RS-232 to USB adapter. But there are others that I am more proud of, such as this one since it’s the longest fiction piece that I’ve published here (3,334 words) or this one since it was a prediction about Facebook that came true.
I’ve had exactly 1 guest author – my dear friend Anurag. He wrote a short piece here back in 2009 about India Gate and Indian bureaucracy, remnants of an age of oppression. Though he came back to my blog to help me out in other ways, I’ve dropped the idea of guest authors since no one in my friends circle seems particularly interested in blogging anyways. I’ve had a few guest editors here, including my dear brother Nipun, but I’m so lazy that I’ve managed not to tag those posts correctly and can’t reproduce those links for you here, oh reader. Perhaps one day I’ll go back and look for those posts.
A lot has happened since that hot August of 2007 when I started blogging, probably from my hostel in Engineering college. I’ve shifted countries, jobs, ideologies and friends but for all that is lost and all that is gained, I’m glad I’ve had this constant companion. I’m glad I have something to tinker with, to learn from, to lean on and grow with. A public journal if there ever was one, I’m glad I have this blog to keep me company whenever I have an idea that I want the world to see.
So today, a little late, but a lot grateful, I thank WordPress and I thank the Internet for being there, for caring, sometimes a lot and sometimes frustratingly not enough. For reading my silly stories, and serious articles. For treating my word as Like-worthy and Share-worthy and Ignore-worthy. I’ll keep writing and hopefully you’ll keep reading. Here’s to many more years of words showing up on these pages.
Cheers!
Nitin