Happy 5th Blogiversary To Me

On October 1, 2018, I published my first “real” post on this blog, making this my blog’s 5th birthday. Happy Blogiversary to me!

Today seems like a good time to reflect on this last year of blogging.

Last year I wrote: this past year has been a difficult one in many [personal] ways. Blogging has been more challenging too, many of the bloggers I like to follow have cut back as well, as I often find inspiration for my writing after reading someone else’s thoughts.

This year has been more of the same. I have been blogging less, due mostly to low mental bandwidth (see above). I have tried to keep up twice weekly posts on Mondays and Fridays.

Wins

Since last year’s blog anniversary post, I have published a Friday fitness post weekly (except for January), a number of round up posts (linking to posts that I liked), and a few place holders. Between one thing and another, I became more comfortable with skipping my Monday posts.

Despite all that, I did write 27 Monday posts on various subjects.

Two were featured by Physician on Fire in his Sunday Best series: Giving, Thanks and Money and The Flip Side of Medicine and Money. Not surprisingly, those two posts, out of all the posts I wrote in the past year, were the most read.

Some other posts from the year that I would like to highlight include:

• Flirting With One More Year, which garnered a few thoughtful comments from readers.
• Lessons Learned From My Spending As A New Attending let me enjoy a trip down memory lane. I hope that it might help some readers make better choices than I did, when they see a big jump in their income.
• Chasing The First Social Security Bendpoint may or may not be helpful for others. But I spent a lot of time thinking about numbers, and trying to figure out if having Mr. PiN go back to work for a years would help pad his Social Security enough to make the inconvenience worthwhile.

I have mixed feelings about my round up posts (found under the ‘Blogging’ tab), but I do like a way to gather up posts I may want to find in the future. And I hope that a shout out is welcome to the bloggers I feature (even if I don’t have such a huge readership to send many people to them). Making this a monthly feature, instead of doing this randomly, feels better to me.

I think the real highlight of the year was feeling more engaged as a blogger. I also, finally, figured out a few things related to Word Press Reader, which may make it easier for people to get updates on new posts if they wish.

I was thrilled to have several people return to comment on my posts. Thank you especially to Michelle from Boomer Eco Crusader, Mel from BrokeGirlRich, and C, for making me feel like part of a blogging community.

Thanks also to Frogdancer Jones of Burning Desire for Fire to reminding me about Feedly. I spend a lot less time trying to find new posts by my favorite bloggers these days.

Enjoy the game for the game’s sake

Blog views, never high, have tailed off dramatically.

I was approached about improving my SEO ranking, and I eventually realized that I would rather have a personal blog, than a generic blog with (maybe) more hits.

However, I’d rather not feel that I am just shouting into the void. I very much appreciate those who do read my blog, and make the effort to comment on it.

I do have (faint) hopes that that my blog may inspire others: to save money, to invest wisely, to take a walk.

If you enjoy my blog, please feel free to share a post with friends, family, co-workers. You can follow me on WordPress, and can now sign up to get an email when I post something new (it only took me 4 and 1/2 years to find that toggle. Sigh).

If you enjoy the blog and aren’t sure about sharing it, a special blogiversary present that I would really appreciate is: drop me a note. It’s easiest to leave a comment, but if the comments section is closed, or you prefer to say something privately, send an email to physicianinnumbers at gmail dot com.

Meanwhile, I would like to thank you, my readers, for visiting my site and (maybe) celebrating my blogiversary with me.