Perspective
So as I’ve mentioned on here, I’m going through all my old blog posts one by one, recording information about them in an Excel spreadsheet, and fixing my “category” tags, as I have added a few more that seem appropriate additions to the 35 original categories I had (for example, I’ve added a “walking” category so that I can move all my walking-related posts out of the “health” category).
I’m currently in the middle of my Year 4, which corresponds to October 2009. What was I doing in October 2009? Starting grad school at UBC.
This made me realize something. My first round of undergrad took up only the first 3.5 years of my nearly 20 years of blogging. That is an incredibly short amount of time. In my head, I always think of that first round of undergrad as being a very significant portion of my life time-wise – probably because of all the stuff that happened during it – but at this stage of my life, it really was just a small blip.
Which is weird to think about.
Like, I’ve been living in Calgary for over 10 years now and that seems like a shorter amount of time than Undergrad Round I.
It’s weird how our brains frame things like that, isn’t it?
Do you have a period in your life that feels like it lasted a lot longer than it actually did?
HAHAHA WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON
Look at my daily blog views, friends:
EXCUSE ME??
Almost SIX THOUSAND views in one day?
For someone who usually gets like 25 per day max (except for recently with that guy from Columbus), that’s insane. And unprecedented. And weird.
I figured these views were from Columbus Guy, but nope:
We’re in Germany now, apparently.
So yeah, yet another weird blog viewing pattern that’s new and strange and unexplainable.
Interesting.
Edit: it went back down to normal after today and hasn’t spiked again since, so…
Interloper, IDENTIFY YOURSELF!
So…I noticed this happening with Eigenblogger:
And I was like “what is this unprecedented nonsense?” and looked at the individual post stats. Turns out it’s not XTREME POPULARITY for my blog as a whole but rather XTREME POPULARITY for this specific post:
Which is actually not even a legit blog post. It’s one of the pages you can click on in the list of pages at the top of my blog.
There’s nothing really even there…just links to actual blog posts pertaining to my Decade of Music Project.
The weirder thing? None of those five linked posts have many (if any) visits. Even the link to download the list of songs has only a single click in the past 30 days.
So…that’s odd.
Edit: and the vast majority of these visits are all coming from one place: Columbus, OH.
Interesting.
What you up to, Columbus Dude?
Blog Post #7,000: That’s Way Too Many Blog Posts
Yes, you read that correctly: today marks my 7,000th blog post.
That’s 19 years, 1 month, and 29 days of consecutive blogging.
Ridiculous.
The part that’s even more sad is that I’ve still got 3,000 more posts to go (8 years, 2 months, and 17 days) to hit my 10,000th blog post.
EXTRA ridiculous.
Readers: thanks for reading.
Non-readers: HOW ARE YOU EVEN SEEING THIS?!?!?!?!?!?
Eigenblogger Turns 19
Ahoy-hoy!
So today is my 19th blogaversary.
Yes, I’ve been doing this for NINETEEN YEARS. That’s pretty insane.
I don’t really have anything special planned for this anniversary, mainly because next year’s is the big 20 and that’s more important.
But yeah. Thanks to all my loyal readers (Maddie and my mom, haha); I will continue to do this up until my 10,000th blog post…and perhaps beyond!
So I’m formatting my printed blog archives and…
…I’m currently in early- to mid-2020 and am having some pretty wild flashbacks to early Covid times. Remember how scared people were? Remember how much people cared?
Remember how we all agreed to shut down and stay home and try to eradicate this thing?
It’s weird re-living all that stuff via my blog posts. I’ve got one post in mid-March when I was sure that everything would be back to normal enough by the end of the summer so that I could still go down and visit my mom before fall semester started.
Ha.
Though as depressing as those first 1.5 years were, it’s even more depressing now because nobody takes it seriously anymore despite all the deaths, illnesses, and damage to everyone’s bodies.
Humans: the dumbest of the dumb.
Half Life (not the game this time, haha)
Counting today, I have now blogged for half my life.
Not half my adult life, but half of my 36-ish years of life.
That’s…pretty wild.
So from now on, I will have spent more of my life daily blogging than not.
Woo?
18 Years of Blogging
So guess what? Eigenblogger is an adult now.
That’s right: today is my 18th blogging anniversary!
The fact that I have a daily record* of my life for the past 18 years is pretty cool. Back when I first started blogging, I had no intention of it lasting anywhere near this long. Hell, I didn’t know if I’d make it to my proposed 50 days in a row back on May 1, 2006.
But I did, then just kept going from there. I guess giving into peer pressure – in this case, the peer pressure from my high school friends to join MySpace – is a good thing sometimes.
ANYWAY.
Today will be my 6,576th blog post. That means I have 3,424 more posts until I hit my ultimate goal of 10,000. Will I keep going after that?
Probably.
Assuming we’re all not dead by then.
WOO!
*I guess the word “record” is very loosely used here, as like 60% of the time my blogs have nothing to do with went on during the day on which they were written, but whatevs. An entry is an entry!
Half Life (not the game, for once)
Do y’all know what’s special about the date July 27, 2024?
It’s the day that will mark my having blogged half my life. And considering I’ll be 36 (almost 36 and a half) then, that’s a long time to have blogged.
That’s pretty wild, right?
A party shall happen.
(It won’t.)
Make Like a Baby and Head Out
YO so I love Procreate.
Why?
Because I was able to use it to finally, finally able to create a header for Eigenblogger that used my own handwriting rather than a font. Check it:
I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, but the dimensions of the header file are weird and the few prototype headers I drew just didn’t work with those dimensions no matter how much I modified them.
I like it. I’m sure I’ll have to modify it as I will likely change up my color scheme again at some point, but for now it’s all matchy-matchy AND it’s my handwriting. Finally.
YAY!
Blog Facelift
I’ve redone some of the custom CSS for my blog. Observe:
Before:
After:
That’s one of my OLD headers on there; I don’t know if I like it. I don’t like the other one anymore. Maybe I’ll make a new one.
Blogging is Lonely
I’ve mentioned this on here before, but it’s really sad to me how few people blog anymore. Didn’t it seem like everyone had a blog back in the mid-aughts? I don’t know if that’s just because everyone had a MySpace and blogging was pretty well integrated into it, but everyone seemed chill with keeping an online journal of sorts.
Nowadays, though, it’s hard to find bloggers in general, let along daily bloggers. It’s not like I ever interacted with anyone in the blogging community apart from commenting on some of my friends’ blog posts, but it still feels a lot more lonely nowadays. I wish more of y’all would blog – I’d read them, gladly!
Anyway.
Seventeen
Today marks SEVENTEEN YEARS of blogging, yo.
It’s been 17 years since senior year of high school. Isn’t that wild? Does it seem like it’s been that long or does it seem like it’s been longer?
Anyway, I’m still holding off doing any sort of big celebration because I’m waiting for the 18th anniversary (when Eigenblogger is finally an adult, haha), but this yearly anniversary always has to be acknowledged.
Here’s to another year and more!
Progress!
I have now printed and received twelve years of my blogs. That’s May 2006 to April 2018. I’m still formatting the later years, but I really do hope to get a complete hard copy at some point. I think that would be really cool (assuming I have the shelf space, haha).
Anyway.
NoJo MoJo
So back in the Stone Age of my blogging, I made Johari and Nohari windows on some website and asked all my friends to fill them out for me.
Well, who knew that SIXTEEN YEARS LATER that those links would still be active.
What all did people even say?
Me? Overdramatic???? NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!1!!1!!!!!!!one
(I think I made that same damn joke in 2006).
6,000
Hello, faithful readers (all one of you)!
Today is my SIX THOUSANDTH BLOG!
It’s been 6,000 days since May 1, 2006. It’s also 4,000 days until I hit 10,000 blog posts.
That’s pretty wild.
(I know no one cares, but whatever.)
16 Years of Blogging
Today marks my SIXTEENTH anniversary of blogging! Counting today, that’s a total of 5,845 consecutive days of blogging.
I’d say that’s pretty cool.
Sixteen isn’t a super exciting anniversary year (unless it’s your age, I guess), so I’m not going to do anything special for it. But when we hit twenty…watch out!
Periodic
Remember that “Periodic Table of Academic Disciplines” blog post that I made like 300* years ago?
That blog post gets an insane amount of views compared to my other posts. The table itself has been used in quite a few things, too.
Here (slide 4)
Here (slides 8 and 9)
A blog post about it
Kinda cool.
*Ten. It was ten years ago.
Ah, What The Hell.
Let’s classify Eigenblogger.
Is the writer of Eigenblogger “happy” or “upset?”
Huh, that’s surprising. I guess most of my posts are frivolous drivel, anyway, and probably by default seem happier than upset.
Which of 21 classics authors’ styles does Eigenblogger resemble? Here are just the top few:
Yeah, I could see it.
Age of author?
Hahaha, I apparently write like an old fogey or a youth.
Myers-Briggs?
Yup.
Funners.
One Month!
Do y’all know what happens one month from now?
I hit my 15 year blogging anniversary.
That’s…that’s a freaking long time to be blogging. Hopefully I’ll get these blogs updated by then, haha.
K THAT’S ALL BYE
I’m Glad I Have This Blog
I’m pretty sure I’ve said this on here before, but I am very glad I have a record of the last 14+ years of my life in the form of this blog. The reason I’m particularly glad of that as of late is because this whole COVID nonsense has made me even more nostalgic than I normally am and I like having the ability to go back and read about whatever nonsense I was up to five years ago, ten years ago, back at the end of high school, etc.
It allows me to re-live some of that normalcy that we’re all missing so terribly right now, and that’s been helpful for retaining at least some degree of sanity during the last few months.
So yay?
Eigenblogger Turns 14!
AHOY, PEOPLE!
So today marks my 14th year of blogging. That’s 14 years of daily nonsense.
That’s a lot of nonsense. 5,115 days’ worth, to be exact.
Thanks to those of you who still read this on occasion. I don’t understand why you do it, but thank you. I’m not going to do anything special for this anniversary because who freaking cares, but 15 is coming up next year and we all know I like numbers divisible by 5, so there will be something big for that one.
YAY!
Blathering
LOL my 14-year blogging anniversary is coming up in half a month and I have nothing special planned for it because the world is basically spinning backwards right now and nothing that mattered matters and everything that didn’t matter matters and I don’t even know if I care anymore.
In This Blog: Eigenblogger Gets a Facelift
Heyo, nerd buckets!
So if you’re reading this, it’s probably 2021 because that’s when I’ll likely get these blogs published you’ve obviously visited Eigenblogger. And if you’re one of my regular readers (or if this is at least your second time stopping by), you may have noticed the redesign.
Now that I’m in a position where I don’t have to freak out every three months or so about having a job in the upcoming semester, I finally felt like it was safe to spend some money on a blog upgrade – specifically, upgrading to WordPress Premium.
My mom had gotten me WordPress Personal a while back, which allowed me to have the domain of eigenblogger.com instead of eigenblogger.wordpress.com, which on its own is super cool. It also gave me three more GB of storage space (up to 6 from the 3 I got with the free WordPress version).
WordPress Premium allows me to keep my domain, upgrade to 13 GB of storage space (which will definitely be needed if I keep going at my current rate of posting media), the removal of ads, and (what I wanted most of all), advanced design customization. This meant that I could go into the CSS of my current theme and adjust it to be whatever I wanted (whereas before I could only change a limited number of things, like the background color, border color, etc.).
Now. Do I know CSS? LOL NOPE. But did that stop me from mucking around with my theme’s CSS until I got something that I liked? LOL NOPE.
Actually, I like the mucking around bit. That’s actually how I taught myself R (for the most part), LaTeX, and whatever the hell weird mishmash of code WeBWorK uses.
So what do y’all think? It hurts to lose my signature lime green background, but I can now begrudgingly admit that lime green is not the most “easy on the eyes” option to use as a background. I also wanted to simplify the color scheme a bit, so picking dark blue and yellow as the main colors seemed nice.
And I changed my header! FINALLY! Do you like it? It’s a little jagged ‘cause I don’t think I had the text parameters right in Photoshop, but maybe I can fix that with relative ease.
YAY BLOG FACELIFT!
BLOG THE BLOG OF AGES!!!!!
I wish I would have started blogging earlier.
Having a written record of the last 13+ years of my life is super cool; imagine how much cooler it would be if it was the last 18 years of my life. Or 20. Or 25.
I would have a record of all my high school shenanigans.
I would have a record of junior high and how much of my time was spent stalking Lead.
I would have a record of getting my appendix removed.
I would have a record of all the elementary school nonsense and fun, including (possibly) coos.
A lot of changes and transitions have happened in my life since I started blogging, but I definitely missed a lot of important (and unimportant) shifts and changes by waiting until I was 18 to start keeping record.
‘Tis sad. But it’s better than having nothing, I guess.
Eigenblogger 