Keep on blogging
I surprised myself last week by writing almost 2,000 words for a new post on my ACGT science blog. This post came very easily to me and I would go so far as to say it was an enjoyable experience, reminiscing about a decision I was involved in over 20 years ago to decide a new set of gene identifiers for a model organism database:
The ACGT blog was something I started back in 2012 when I was an active science researcher at the Genome Center in UC Davis. I had lots of things on my mind from my research and found it a great way to get things off my chest. My first post is still up:
I went on to write another 300 or so posts while I was still an active scientist. Many of the posts that I wrote — particularly my deep dives into how some bioinformatics program worked — have turned out to be ‘evergreen’ content and continue to receive a lot of traffic (over 10,000 visits for the entire website last year!):
Line chart showing yearly visits to my ACGT website since 2014 (data from Squarespace analytics)
My most popular post continues to be a nerdy deep-dive article that I wrote back in 2014 about some particular pieces of bioinformatics software:
This post received over 2,500 views last year though I am expecting this sort of traffic to slowly dry up now that AI tools will give people accurate enough answers without the need to read all of the underlying material.
Post-science blogging
After I left science research in November 2015 and moved into science communication (January 2016), I still had some ideas for blog content. Including my recent post outlined at the top of this post, I’ve managed to publish almost 40 posts out since then, though very few in recent years (and only three since 2022).
I like the idea that (very) occasionally I have an idea for something that is still relevant (and might even be of interest to people). So I’m happy to continue paying for the ACGT.me domain name and hosting the content for long as there is interest in the content.
Other blogs
In the past I once had an Apple iWeb blog which relived memories of my time at secondary school (age 10-13). Sadly, that was all lost at some point (I’m generally better about saving blog posts these days).
I still have my Molluskan Zodiac blog (the only blog devoted to molluskan-themed horoscopes that are generated by a Perl script) which is still updated weekly. I’ve tried a Medium blog about social media analytics (which is still online, but defunct), a tumblr blog that described the 5-star rated songs in my music library, and many more (including a short-lived technology blog which is still technically online but somewhat hidden).
So I’ve blogged a lot in the past, have been through a relatively quiet period, but hope to gain a bit more enthusiasm going forwards. And this brings me to…
This blog
Away from the active, but infrequently updated, ACGT blog, I obviously have this blog that you (dear reader) are reading now. I started this around the same time as my ACGT blog, but since 2022 I’ve only managed seven posts here. So not exactly proflific, but at least that’s more than twice as many posts as on the ACGT blog. However, I’m trying to be better about coming up with ideas for this blog.
Given that my main job involves digital communications, and that I am a volunteer at a charity where I managed their website and social media, it makes sense that this is a topic I should feel able to write about.
I did make my post eaarlier this year on dark social web traffic and I will try to think of more things like this where maybe I have something useful to say.
I think I also need to be less precious about waiting for a really good idea before writing something. If I want to get back into blogging (which I do), then it is probably more important for me to write things which might be rough thoughts, not yet fully formed.
Additionally, I also think, that I shouldn’t be precious in wanting to only write about digital communications. So maybe this blog will need to ‘find its way’ a bit for me to better identify what it is that I enjoy writing about.
If you’ve got this far, then thank you and if you are also a fellow blogger, then it goes without saying that you should please keep on blogging.