Okay, it is officially tomorrow, but it will be my 1 year anniversary of committing to this whole blogging whim.  If nothing else, I get to check another thing off my life list.  I held myself to completing at least a year of this with a determination at the end of that time to decide to continue or not.  For my own selfish reason I decided to provide a summary of this year’s output (data includes this post):

• According to the WordPress Stats: Total Posts 99 and 27 comments
• Total pages (according to MS Word):155
• Total number of words (according to MS Word):66,172
• Post topics (some posts had multiple categories)
  • Birds:9
  • General:9
  • Observation:59
  • Ramblings:6
  • Recollection:10
  • Service:13
  • Uncategorized:0
  • Wildlife:0
• Blogs by month (numbers did not come out right – think WordPress was reporting wrong by month
  • 12/0:1
  • 1/08:12
  • 2/08:7
  • 3/08:9
  • 4/08:7
  • 5/08:13
  • 6/08:7
  • 7/08:6
  • 8/08:6
  • 9/08:6
  • 10/08/:10
  • 11/08:7
  • 12/08:7
• Writing style: conversational
• Most common grammatical error: using “to” instead of “too”- Word loves to point this out to me
• Number of WordPress uprades:1
• Number of reference links used:45
• Number of images used:81
• Languages uses: 2 (English and a Greek word)
• Completed Life List Items: 4
  • Ran the Steamboat 15K – toughest in IL
  • Purchased apiece of art
  • Blogging for one year
• Maintained convictions:2
  • Never giving Metallica a penny of my money
  • Ban from RIAA backed musicians (and I won by the way – RIAA has decided to stop suing their customers – await upcoming post on this topic)
• Posted 85 more items than my brother over at Dead Reckonings (he clocked in at 13) – yeah, he has me on quality by far… really far actually, but I like to harp on my tiny infrequent wins over my parent’s favorite 8^)
• Personal Revelations:
  • I actually read more books than I thought this year
  • My disposition is clearly on the sarcasm side
  • Pet peeve – bad service
  • I remember more than I thought from my childhood
  • Clearly interested in marketing and economics – ironic since those were my worst subjects in school
  • Definitely leveraging all of his elective psychology classes
  • Enjoys nature

I must admit, I enjoyed my time blogging and I am pretty pleased with the end result.  It strange being able to look back and actually have snapshots in time with aspects that impacted your life along with your person reaction or reasoning at that time.  Since only a year has passed, most of my viewpoints have not changed a great deal, however, it may be interesting to review this content in 5 years or so to see if my disposition has changed or life experiences have altered the way I look at certain situations.  As of now, I have decided to continue with this effort, but I want to change a few things in an effort to improve upon the output:

• Infuse a more graphic perspective – what probably has not come out in all this is my interest in photography and all things related to art in general.  You probably caught a little bit of that with the art purchase post and the photos of wildlife etc.  While creating this summary, I was shocked at how skewed it was to the textual side.
• I need to get caught up with my observations.  I still have a large number of items written down that I want to post on the blog.  If nothing else, I want to be sure and capture the thoughts associated with those occurrences when they happen.
•   Branch out into some additional topics.  This year I focused on the bird side of the wildlife (and thus why it had its own category).  Being out in the country, I have a great variety of different insects and animals that I get to observe just about every day including; deer, snakes, spiders, coyotes etc.  I also want to add a new category on the topic of stupid engineering.  I am getting tired of poor execution on product delivery and have a growing list of examples I would like to share.
• And finally, and to be honest, the most apprehensive goal is to increase viewer numbers and comments.  I purposely left this site unadvertised and somewhat private as I navigated through what I wanted to do with this site.  I was also struggling with the ramifications of knowing others would be viewing the content and might be offended or think differently of me if they did not agree with a position I took or a comment that was made.  This is still a concern of mine, but the only way I’ll get an answer to this is to simply try it.

Lastly, I would like to thank everyone that did take the time to read my ramblings and especially appreciative of those who invested time to add comments.  It has been fun and looking forward to continuing this in 2009.