== A year (and a bit) of WanderingThoughts

I'm bad with anniversaries and at making blog entries come out on time,
so it was a year and nine days ago that I wrote the [[very first
WanderingThoughts entry web/CSSIrritation]], not a pleasingly exact
year. There's probably a lesson in this.

(Or a year and eight days, depending on how I count it; while I wrote
the first two entries on June 11th, I only made the decision to keep
writing at the pace of an entry a day on the 12th, when I wrote
BlogGenesis.)

Over the course of the past year (and a bit) I've written 472 entries
(not counting this one), amounting to 173,883 words and 1,087,994 bytes
according to _wc_ (which overcounts things). There's been 225 comments,
only 77 of them written by me (I'm surprised that I haven't
written a higher proportion). A less pleasant number is that there have
been 78 pieces of comment spam that I've had to clean out.

(The sheer size of WanderingThoughts sometimes boggles me, since I
still think of myself as a reluctant and slow writer.)

Clearly I've met my goal of putting up at least one entry a day; in
fact, with one early exception I've actually *written* an entry every
day (since this includes holidays, I'm some kind of masochist).

(Early on I wrote four entries one Saturday morning in a burst of
enthusiasm and then trickled them out over the following days. That's
when I discovered that sitting on completed entries kills my motivation,
since it feels totally artificial to not just post them.)

The big effect of writing for a year is that I feel that my typing has
gotten noticeably faster. I think that my spelling has improved to [[some
extent SpellingDigression]], and I can probably now write faster than a
hundred words an hour (on good days; I still have bad days when it feels
like I'm trying to extract the entry from a stone with my bare hands).

But the big thing I've discovered is that blogging is surprisingly
addictive; I'm actually looking forward to the next year of
WanderingThoughts. (And it eats your brain. I think about entry topics
*all the time*.)