In the past 37 months, I have written 472 posts, or about 13 blog entries (posts in WordPress lingo) a month — roughly 3 a week. My active readership seems kind of small, with roughly one comment for each post, but my ClustrMap‘s little Mercator projection is covered with red blobs over North and South America, Europe, China, Australia and the Middle East. So somebody must be reading me, even if they leave no comments behind. According to ClustrMap, SiteMeter and my own stats application, there have at least 40,000 visits to this URL since August 2006 — a mere pittance compared to, say, ScienceBlogs superstar PZ Myers, but a helluva lot more than I ever expected.

In the beginning, the blog was just a means for me to vent my frustrations at how willfully ignorant and unscientific Americans seem to be. I also had the intention, which has yet to find its full fruition, to make the blog a place to teach physics and astronomy. As the months passed, I found myself commenting on religion, civil liberties, evolution vs. intelligent design, music, film and a host of more random issues. Since August 2008 the focus understandably switched to my new life in China. I have a wide range of interests, so I suppose the blog reflects that.

WordPress is a great platform for blogging. Rather than go with a blog hosted by WordPress, I opted to host this site on a host on which I had another, largely dormant computer information site. While it certainly would have been easier to let WordPress.com deal with all the technical issues, in the end it was a wise choice. The Great Firewall of China blocks access to all of www.wordpress.com (but not wordpress.org, the development site). Had I hosted there, I would have had to go through the Tor proxy network to access my own site! My webhosts, Planet Earth Hosting, have been reliable, helpful and friendly all these years.

There is an active open-source community centered around WordPress, too. My posts are now automagically posted on my MySpace, Facebook and now LinkedIn pages, and I can import comments to my Facebook notes back to this site. Readership is thus wider, for very little effort. Nice.

On the downside, WordPress upgrades have broken my Amazon application that enabled me to look up merchandise, add the links to each post, and thus get some pennies on the dollar added to my Amazon Associates account. The last I checked, the developer of that handy little app was no longer working on it, so any links I add have to be done manually.

Not that I expected to make any real money from blogging. Despite what the so-called experts say, to make money blogging requires a lot of effort and an overriding mission to design your site to pull in readers. That was never my goal. Hosting a website on a shared server is so damned cheap now that I could care less if I make back the $80 I paid Planet Earth Hosting for a year’s subscription. So, my readers will be spared rightwing (or leftwing, in my case) rants, juicy gossip about superstars, or even juicier photos of partially clad women. (My webhost does not allow nudity or porn, so apparently they are not in this business for big bucks, either.)

I read somewhere on the Intertubes that bloggers tend to lose their enthusiasm within the first year. Maybe their lives become busier, or the reason for the blog changes (travel, for example), or they just run out of things to say. Writing is damned hard work, even for someone like me who used to do it professionally — for pay even! I can start a post and several hours later (literally!) I can glance at the clock and wonder what time warp I fell into.

Blogging for me is therapeutic. I can inform, rant, complain, vent and/or ramble aimlessly, and if someone reads it, it’s cool. If no one does, I don’t really care too much. I’m writing for me in a way, with the hope that someone somewhere might find it useful or interesting or worth commenting on.

So onward I go, into the fourth year of Wheat-dogg’s World. I hope you stick around, too.