One of the unique features of this blog is the little counter down in the bottom right of the site. It’s a little feature that simply increments by 1 number each day. Today it stands at 2,920.
What this means is that it was 2,920 days ago that I decided to make this blog an every day affair. Divide 2,920 by 365 and you get 8, which means that it has now been 8 years since I made that decision to blog every day (and since I began to keep that commitment). Even though this site dates back to September of 2002, which is when I registered the domain name challies.com, it was about a year later that the blog really became what it is today–or, at least, that it began to become whatever it is today.
It was back then, at the very end of October 2003, that I decided to blog every day for a year. Even though the site had been in existence for a year, it was not going very well. I wasn’t at all committed to the site and was adding a new article only every week or two. I decided that I needed to either make it into something worthwhile or just give up and find something else to do with my time. I set the challenge: I would blog every day for a year or I would throw in the towel and find a new hobby. So I set out with the daily blogging. It wasn’t always easy and the results weren’t always good, but things improved over the course of the year. When the end of that first year came around, I decided to recommit to the daily writing and have done so ever since.
Some people have suggested I need to ditch this counter–that it is in some way prideful. I don’t see it that way. I see it as a little bit of the site’s history and something that I’d hesitate to remove. Yes, 2,920 seems like a silly number, but I guess it just reminds me of when the number was 2 or 200 or 365–when I was using it as motivation to slog through another day on my goal to 1 year of daily blogging. I hardly ever look at it anymore, but I’m glad that it’s there, day after day, slowly incrementing just like it’s done every day for 8 years.
