10 year Anniversary of The Honest Hypocrite

This week is the ten year anniversary of this wonderful blog, The Honest Hypocrite!  I can barely remember that at the time I was reading a number of favorite blogs, BoingBoing comes to mind, and I loved that the relatively still new to me (several years) form of the blog produced new and interesting writing every day just for me to read.  I loved the chance to participate by commenting.

My girlfriend at the time (now wonderful wife of many years) was also a reader and lover of blogs.  We would chat, and still do, about the things that we had read that day on the internet.  I always had some comment about something I wanted to see or have done in a certain way and she said well why don't you start a blog then, and inspired by her and some other blogs, I did.

It helped that Blogger provided a free and easy to use platform.  And because of that I learned a smattering of html and grew more open to contributing to things like Wikipedia and wikis in general. It wasn't that far of a push to be on Twitter when it came out and Tumblr to grab honesthypocrite before someone else did.

Blogging caused me to write essays like I hadn't since high school.  I am sure my high school English teacher would be proud.  I hope writing blog posts, tweets, e-mail, vine and youtube video scripts, Wikipedia article edits and things I haven't even heard of, are part of the writing curriculum now.   This blog has waxed and waned over the years.  I have tried to fight the tendency for it to be just a set of links and to write about topics that I care about.  I have enjoyed including some mathematical, scientific, or data analysis as part of the offering because they are things that I like and writing about them helps get it out of my systems and helps to order my thoughts.

I'll probably never get back to the heady times of 50, 30 or even 20 posts/month like in the early days. There are so many other places with more visitors to post to.  Tumblr gets the pictures and the commentary to share with the various TV show fandoms, Twitter the tweets, facebook the friend and family stuff, wikis the research, blogs the comments.  I certainly consume more than I produce anymore.

Family has taken some time from this hobby while providing both more and less things to write about.  I have become aware of wanting to respect others privacy, writing about me is one thing, writing about them is another.  Besides if they want they can do it themselves.

I don't suppose I will ever stop, and certainly this anniversary will prompt me to reinvigorate my efforts.  It will be time for some retrospectives as I continue.  Thank you for reading.