I find it a bit daunting to get my head around this, but in one form or another I've been blogging since the start of 1999. Back then we seriously thought there was going to be a massive computer crash on the last day of the year/century, and took care to save decent backups of everything offline.
This particular incarnation of the Sift blog only goes back two years, but my "Sift" blog has been around for over a quarter of a century, and the logo was a remix of the Shift motocross clothing brand from the from the 90's.
For most of that time my posts have been totally random, and I averaged only about two posts a week for 25 years, but for some reason I became more anal at the start of 2024 and decided to start aiming to do a post of some sort every day.
I'm not trying to make them all great masterpieces or anything, some are just stuff like one liners with a meme, but it has been a strange ambition at the back of my mind to match the number of blog posts with the number of days each month. Why?, I have no idea...
So the two months this year (May & July) where I skipped posting for the month were actually unusual breaks in a very long running habit. Those months off were experiments to test two things:
Firstly I wanted to see if I missed blogging? - Yes, I did, and by the end of a month I was definitely hanging out to post something.
And secondly I wanted to see if not posting had any effect on the number of "hits" my blog got. I expected that not posting would reduce the number of hits, so was quite surprised in May when they went up. And that was why I repeated the experiment again in July. Again, the hits went up when I stopped posting. Odd.
This post: "MY AI AUDIENCE" goes on about that subject further.
My best theory about what is going on is that most internet traffic is now AI, and traffic flows are being used to shape the entire internet. If I'm not posting anything on my Blogger blog, Google (who own Blogger) want to encourage me to keep the blog alive, so they increase my traffic to make posting seem more worthwhile.
But if I am regularly posting, Google, who I'm sure would actively dislike my content, might reduce their AI hits, in the hope of either driving me away altogether, or in a misguided attempt to motivate me to post more approved content. Neither option seems to have worked out for them, but yes, that really is all I came up with...
Now when I look over my posts for the year, those two months with only one post are blots on my blogging landscape, and I have an urge to go back and fill them out. It's very unlikely that many actual people will ever look at anything I retrospectively post way back in May or July, so this will be entirely just for my own anal perfectionism.
I'm going to look back over my old posts, attempting to find some that I haven't already updated or re-posted here on this current Sift blog, that I still think are relevant and interesting in 2025. And if I find any, I'll stick them into the empty days of July first.
If it doesn't all work out well, that may be the end of this somewhat odd plan, but if I do find heaps of suitable posts, I'll fill out July, and then maybe even go back further and do May as well.
