Looking back at this blog’s very first entry, I am amazed at my naïveté regarding the amount of work I tricked myself into thinking I’d be able to dedicate to this endeavour. I “plan[ned] to have a Spanish and German version up and running as well”, oh my! So far, no translations have materialised. Nowadays, with good online translators that would be much easier to achieve than ten years ago, but as there seems to be very little traffic on the website in general as well as on the blog (over the years I have not received any comments or backlinking from other webpages), such kind of extra-work seems foolish.
Regarding traffic: The formulation that there seems to be little of it shows the fact that I actually do not know that. Against all advice about blogging or even, more basically, creating content on the internet, I do not employ software to track activity on my webpage or generate any kind of stats, although with WordPress (which is underlying this webpage) that would be quite easy. At least, though, I automatically make regular backups, which has helped me at least once. Still, this nonchalance underlines the fact that I do not quite know for which purpose(s) I keep feeding this beast.
Another, more technical expansion plan for this blog was to host it myself on a mini-computer I bought in 2016; I still have it, and I am still experimenting with it: Putting a new OS and different sets of software on it and trying to configure it correctly. This is extremely intermittent stuff, and although a WordPress instance is usually part and parcel of the software suite I install, I realised while reading into the topic that maintaining an even moderately secure blog instance is quite time-consuming. And with all kinds of work to be done apart from blogging, I just don’t feel like moving towards self-hosting. Therefore, this plan can definitively be labelled as shelved.
That this blog is not my priority is visible when regarding this very post. Its first part was published in May, and I had this second part drafted more or less at the same time. Yet, just re-working and expanding it a bit took me half a year.
If that sounds a bit frustrated, it’s because sometimes I am. Yet, usually I realise that this blog is like a house: It’s always work in progress. And there are some minor improvements: I have fixed a minor visual issue on the landing page, which has been bothering me for over a year, but which I managed to ignore for that whole time. I guess that’s the kind of dedication that will keep this blog (and the website in general) going strong for another decade!
