This is my 200th post in 2025. There’s still over a month to go in this year, so I’ll have more. When I started this blog, it was going to be nothing but books. I wanted a place where I could talk about books I’ve read, what I was going to read, and other book related things.

If you go all the way back, which you can do by going to my Archives Page, you’ll see the first few posts are all about the books. And for sure, I’ve written a lot about reading this year. But I’ve escaped that niche and this has turned into a blog about whatever I want to talk about. It has been freeing in a way I didn’t really think was possible when I set out. And as time goes on, I discover more and more things I really love about blogging.

I can’t even believe how much the blog itself has changed over the year. I started on WordPress. It sucked. I moved to Ghost. It was okay, but I still didn’t care for it. And then I moved to Hugo. Hugo is awesome. While I could use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to write my own blog engine, Hugo does everything I need, and it does it extremely well. I’ve expanded this blog to include almost everything I want in a blog, and I don’t have any worry about WordPress issues or a breaking change from Ghost ruining everything. If something gets ruined here, it’s probably because I did something boneheaded.

One of the things that I’ve enjoyed about writing every day for the last few months, is that it has forced me to think about and plan out my posts a little more. Sometimes, I just sit and write, but now I have lists of topics I want to write about, so that if I don’t have an idea just pop in my head, I can consult a list and find something to do. It has also kept the blog at the top of my mind. I’ve blogged many times before on many different platforms, but they always fade away. I don’t want that to happen here, and blogging every day is one way I’m trying to make this a habit.

One of the best things, though, about blogging is that I’m not alone. There are a lot of bloggers out there on the small web, and that makes this feel like I’m a part of something bigger, and not just writing into the abyss. A lot of my fellow writers read my blog, and I go read their blogs, and that’s pretty cool. We provide inspiration for each other, and I think, that keeps us all going, at least a little bit. You can check out some of the blogs I follow on my blogroll.

So, yeah, 200 posts in a year. I plan to keep up my blog every day habit next year, so I’ll definitely beat that number.

The on thing I want to leave this post on, though, is that blogging has made me happier. I’m generally a happy guy, but the world is shit (it always is), and jobs and family and all that “life” stuff, can just weigh you down. Blogging has made me able to escape some of that, has allowed me to express myself better, and has made me feel better in the long run. So the blog thing turned out to be a good idea. :)