Blog Post No. 500

My post with a detailed recipe (including step-by-step photos) on how to make Zwetschgendatschi remains one of my most popular posts. Who would have thought? Not me.

500 blog posts! It’s not a milestone I particularly aspired to, and probably wouldn’t have noticed, were it not for Blogger’s tally at the top of the list of all my posts. I started this blog in January 2011. Now, three years and nine months later, I have arrived a post no. 500. For some bloggers that’s might not be a lot; they have reached that within a year or so as they blog almost every day. For me, it is a milestone worth noting.

So where am I, 500 blog posts later?

1. Blogging has truly become part of my life. I’m proud that I’ve kept a steady clip.
2. Twice a week is my blogging frequency. I experimented with how often I should blog; I did three Blogathons, and last August I participated in a daily blog challenge that finally taught me that my rate of blogging is simply twice a week. Sometimes less, sometimes more, but it averages out to that.
3. That August Break blog challenge also taught me that I want to blog about what I want to blog about. Someone else’s prescriptions don’t work for me.
4. I’ve become a photographer. I didn’t see that one coming. Now I have a photo essay coming out in Bella Grace.
5. I’ve developed my blogging voice. I do still get carried away with new ideas, however. Sometimes I end up being comfortable with those, sometimes I realize they were really fads, or someone else’s way of blogging. But I tell myself that it’s good to keep experimenting.
6. I crave the interaction with and affirmation from my blog readers. No other form of publication really provides that.
7. Like any other endeavor, blogging is its own thing. You have to learn about it and keep learning, challenge yourself and keep going. You don’t just do it on the side. It becomes something else you do, something you commit to and then it rewards you in ways you could have foreseen (see point 4).
8. Old successful posts keep on giving, meaning they are useful to new readers and keep delighting me as well. For example, I continue to get comments on my Zwetschgendatschi recipe from three years ago. People are still happy to find it, and every fall new comments remind me that I need to bake it again, which I did this weekend, hence the photo.