A blog quinceañera

I’ve been very excited by the way this graph has been coming along:

You don’t get many graphs like that in my business where the difference between the groups is so clear!

I get one, maybe two, points on that graph most weekdays, so that’s a few months of steady work there.

I’ve been so distracted by the awesome data above that I neglected to mention that this blog clocked past the 15 year mark. Fifteen years is one of those anniversary years that feels... almost not worth celebrating. But I was reminded because I was tweeting about what I do as part of the #NDTMeetScienceTwitter hashtag, and I mentioned the blog’s age.

It’s now been so long that sometimes even I forget how long this project has been running. I recently re-read a forthcoming piece I wrote about blogging, where I said I started this blog in 2003, not 2002. Whoops. That’s going to drive me crazy if I see that in print now.

While much of science online has moved to other media platforms (and to some degree, I have followed that trend), the longer I have done this, the more the value of this blog has risen for me. “Tweetstorms” and Twitter threads are okay, but I still like sentences and paragraphs for some things. Blog posts are easier for me to find. I refer back to old posts constantly for one reason or another. Lots of topics are practically evergreen in science and academia, so a blog post can have a very long tail.