Astronomy Buff

One Year of Astronomy Blogging

by Tony on December 29th, 2007

Whew! I can hardly believe it. I’ve been at this blogging thing for one year now.

According to my WordPress stats, I’ve posted 264 times and I have 913 comments. (I’m surprised I’ve had 264 things to say, actually). I have 191 people subscribed to my feed and about 650 new people show up to my blog everyday to see what hyjinx I’m planning.

Blogging is a lot harder than it looks. When I first posted 12 months ago, I promised that I would stick to astronomy, be different than other astronomy blogs, not rant, be interesting, and not write short posts.

For the most part, I’ve stuck to those promises, I’ve not ranted, I post mostly on astronomy, but I have resorted to shorter posts. The main reason is that I’m obligated to post six times a week, and there’s no way I have the time to write six essays every week, so I fudge and write shorter ones.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the past year about blogging:

• It is extremely time consuming. I spend most of my time trying to be different and not duplicate what others are posting about unless I have something meaningful to add.
• I’m amazed at the quality of readers I have. The readers of this blog (that’s you) have kept me going and motivate me to provide content. Thanks to all of you who’ve contributed: Julie, Beau, Fredrica, Samuel, r06u3AP, Rúni Bang Larsen, Shannon, Brian Karczewski, and so many more. You guys are the real value here.
• If I weren’t part of a network, I’d probably have stopped six months into it. It turns out that I really need the support of a network to keep me going. Without it, my life would distract me and too much time would pass between posts. Knowing that I have a minimum number of posts I must write or risk losing the blog keeps me on task.
• Rubbing elbows with the best has been lots of fun. There are some outstanding bloggers out there, I am constantly struggling to keep up.
• People don’t read long, involved posts. Posts longer than 500 words tend to be scanned and not fully read. That’s one reason I’ve switched to writing shorter ones.
• My most commented posts are the ones that are personal. I can spend two hours writing a post on dark energy and get no comments, while one post telling a personal story almost always garners a comment.
• There’s a lot of great astronomy information out there. Between Phil, AstroProf, Sean, NASA, Universe Today, NewScientist, Sky and Telescope, and a host of other websites and blogs, there’s not shortage of news and info. My challenge has always been to provide you with something different, a skewed perspective on astronomy that you’ll, hopefully, find interesting.
• Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t be like those other guys. I’m too weird for that.
• Getting attention is a double edged sword.
• I now keep a notebook with me at all times to jot down post ideas.

I really love this blog. It’s become a part of me in ways I never imagined. I’ve written posts in all sorts of strange places:

• Iowa rest stops (did you know there is free wireless in all rest stops in Iowa?)
• Airport gates and bars (I know, that’s not so strange, but it is to me, I feel so cosmopolitan blogging from an airport).
• Passenger seat of a car, and once in the driver’s seat. (Don’t worry, I was pulled over).
• Hotel rooms in Canada, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois and Indiana.
• Observatory domes
• Hospital bedside.
• In the dark, next to my telescope at 3am.
• Meetings at work and at talks and conferences. (Well, everyone else looked so busy on THEIR laptops, I thought I’d look busy too).

Places I’ve never written a blog post:

• Starbucks or Barnes and Noble. Too pretentious.
• The bathroom. Thank God, huh?
• At a party.
• While drunk (although I’ve considered it a couple of times).

It’s very strange to build something like this up from scratch and see it take on a life of it’s own. Being a blogger has made me a more informed astronomer, I keep up to date with more info than I ordinarily would, I look outside of my own research interests more and try to be conversant in more fields of astronomy.

That is, except for string theory, no one understands that crap anyway…

Thanks to all of you for staying with me, here’s to another year of blogging…

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