5 Years and 1000 Posts of ch-athens - Happy New Year!

For the first three years of ch-athens I was writing combined new years and aniversary posts (2006, 2007, 2008), as ch-athens was started as a new years resolution. Last year I didn't, because I wasn't feeling like it. This year I'll revive the tradition. Along with wishing you all a happy new year, I'm celebrating 5 years of ch-athens and... the 1000th post of this weblog.

Over the last two years, the rate of me writing has changed. I wrote a lot less. Where I was writing a post every one to two days in the beginning, I'm getting closer to once or twice per week. The focus has changed a bit too: I'm less exploring Athens and living here, more directionless recording some things that cross my mind. This somehow mirrors my focus in life too, living in Athens has become less important. Biggest new theme was photography picking up.

I don't know if my enthousiasm will pick up again or what direction it could take. I'm not going in any direction of whatever is fashionable now... I abhore "twitter" and "facebook", I see them as yet another step in mindlessly commercialising the web and the net. Heck, the thought that all these people publish their "creativity" through the site of just one or the other company makes me feel sick. Where is the decentrality, the uncontrollability, the independence of the net gone?

From the statistics front, it's difficult to get a coherent picture, as I'm comparing apples and oranges. I've changed my stats, in that I don't record accesses to my various RSS feeds any more. They were too much skewing the numbers. The result is that the numbers went down.

I think there are a few reasons why they went down: One, the stats changed. Two, I did not write so much any more. Three, I've eliminated some sources for Google sending misdirected visitors to some of my pages.

Ah, Google. I've started to think these guys have gotten fat and bored and lost all sense of doing something useful. They have stopped to be a search engine for sure, instead occupying themselves with selling hot air and attempting to take over the world. For years a lot of the traffic on my weblog has been people Google mistakenly sent here. For example to a page where visitors expected to find greek pr0n, or a page where they sought answers to german grammar questions and other mistakes. I've changed the titles and spelling of one word in one case, to get rid of that useless traffic. There a few cases where people find useful stuff on my site, and I truly like those!

There's an overlap of my stats, my loss of enthousiasm, and the rate of posts I see from my "other weblogs" links. Has "blogging" slowly gone out of fashion? Yes, but the sure thing is that I don't care, I'm just looking for my own reason to do something or not. It's terrific to have done something for 5 years, ups and downs, about 200 posts per year, through all these times.