I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of relative time, especially as it pertains to internet time.
For example: if on the same day, you meet a new friend in person and a new friend online– chances are, assuming equal amounts of time spent with each, you’ll be much closer to that online friend in a few months. It’s as if time moves faster online. Relationships move to a new level faster, secrets are revealed earlier, and glimpses into the inner-workings of the people you know are more clear.
Not only does the perception of time move faster online to me, each social media platform runs on its own timescale. Replying to a tweet 3 days after it was posted is a lot like saying, “See you later!” to someone who left your house 3 hours ago.
That said, blog-time moves faster, too– maybe not quite as fast as tweet-time, but fast. There’s no real math to calculate how much faster it is, so I’ve made some up.
According to my confabulated, convoluted rules for blog-aging, my blog turns 3 today!
My math goes something like this:
That’s the beauty of math. If you work it right, there’s always a reason to celebrate.
In other words, my blog is 300 days old today. Yay for celebrating arbitrary milestones!
Back in March, I made a list of blog-goals I’d like to accomplish before my 3rd-blog-birthday. Of course, life interrupted with some surprises as always, but I did cross quite a few items off my list!
Items on the List, Accomplished:
- I suggested 5 posts to the Freshly Pressed team and two were Freshly Pressed (here and here)! I have no idea if they were queued to be Freshly Pressed anyway, or if millions of others tweeted in to suggest the same, but I consider it pretty successful.
- I didn’t review several hundred books on GoodReads, but I did rate several hundreds. I decided to start with stars and work my way up to words. When I rate 1000 books, I’ll start those reviews. (How do book bloggers do it?!)
- I put together a “Bookshelf” featuring blogging authors I know, an Awards page, a Thank You page, and a “Posts You Missed” page which I’m counting as an alternative form of a Table of Contents.
- I removed old posts with no viewership. Maybe I’ll repost them someday.
- I fixed most of my typos.
- I cleaned up my menu!
- I set visibility settings on my sidebar so that not every page sees the same things on the side, and I added social media links for people to connect (if they want to) elsewhere. I also added a disclaimer.
- I wrote 5 guest blog posts, and promised 1. Two went live (here and here), two I didn’t hear back on, 1 is scheduled, and 1 is set for August.
- I submitted two articles and one article suggestion to online magazines and 1 literary magazine. I only heard back from the one that wanted to see my stats. The other two did not respond, but hey– I did it.
- I syndicated my blog to a few smaller feeds, and at least set up a Google+ account.
- I have saved 17 cents for custom fonts. A penny for every time I say something that I can’t really pull off. Like, “Oh snap”, “Bloody mess” or “Are you pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down?”.
Items Not on the List, Accomplished:
- Make a blog and social media presence for our family company, Queen Creative.
- Make a Facebook page, even if all I do there is send publicized posts from my blog, my husband’s blog, and our company blog.
Still to do:
- Make a video post.
- Email all the wonderful Rarasaur readers, one at a time.
- Make a glossary for Prompts for the Promptless.
- Respond to every comment, even if I’m ridiculously late.
- Figure out the best thing to do with my tags.
- Make a page/post dedicated to all my favorite posts from you guys.
Sure there’s still stuff left to do, but it looks overall like a win to me. Happy birthday to me!
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For my blog birthday, I think I’m going to go into the blogosophere and make some new friends. Do you have any suggestions for me?
How do you feel about my thoughts on internet time relativity?
Do you enjoy video blogs, or should I just cross that one off the to-do list?
