Pun Salad

My archives say the first official post to this blog was February 27, 2005 (at 9:19am). So here we are, eight years later (plus a few hours).

It's still fun. I plan to keep going. Sometimes I envy the more popular blogs. How, exactly, does James Lileks manage to put up hundreds of words every darn weekday about his activities and opinions, and manage to make it all fascinating? Or Glenn Reynolds: he sees all, and tells us all about it.

But (to be honest) I'm not sure how well I would handle it if Pun Salad were more popular. The blog has had a couple brushes with "fame", where it was mentioned on a high-volume site. And each time, I developed an odd kind of writer's block for a few days afterward: Eek! People might actually read this! Now what?

So I've become less compulsive about blogging. If I don't think I have anything interesting to say, I probably won't say it. I think I've had some pretty good insights over the years, but there are only a finite number of them, and it's difficult to recycle them freshly.

Here's a little gnuplot graph I hacked up showing the trend in the monthly article count for the past eight years:

A little dispiriting: the overall trend is clearly downsloping. I'll try to do better. But I hope you've set yourself up to use my RSS feeds so you don't have to keep checking for new content by hand.

And, yes, I really did post 67 articles in March 2006. I look at it now in wonder.

Anyway, to those still reading: thanks, and I hope you'll stick around.