NaClhv

Theology, philosophy, math, science, and random other things
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
2023-12-11
Importance: 

Ten year anniversary for the blog!

Ten years! (image by Sam Bald)

This is a rare post, and I consider myself to have been tremendously blessed to make it.

Not many blogs make it to the 10-year mark. As for me, I was fairly certain that I would never run out of material. But I did wonder about other factors, like reaching enough readers to keep up my motivation, and possible life changes that would force me to stop. Yet by the grace of God, here I am.

In comparison to my two year anniversary post, I think I'm much more comfortable now with having "off-topic" posts. My posts on the Disney movies "Frozen" and "Tangled" still draw much traffic. I think one marker - perhaps THE marker - of a robust framework is how many disparate things you can fit inside it, and the fact that I can connect such unexpected topics speaks to the strength of my Christ-centric worldview. I have actually expanded more into such topics, even as I've often link them back to Christianity, as I believe this shows that God will indeed be all in all.

Much of my comfort here with going "off-topic" comes from the strength of my explicitly Christian posts. I am especially pleased with my work on the Genesis creation story, which has blown up since S. Joshua Swamidass and I discovered one another, and the publication of his book on the same topic. I am grateful for our providential independent discoveries on the same crucial topic, and the collaborations that followed.

The other work that I feel very good about is my post on Jesus's resurrection. It is long, and gets quite dense and technical later on, which probably contributes to the fact that it hasn't been discovered much by the internet at large. But as for its contents, I like it even more than my work on the Genesis creation story.

So, I have resolved the creation/evolution controversy, and demonstrated that Jesus clearly rose from the dead. These conclusions are definitive, and the reasoning behind them are solid. This gives me great confidence in both the overall core "branding" of my blog, and my ability to expand out to more peripheral, even diversionary topics. I think I can cover it all. Because I believe that there is only one story in the universe, one Gospel that flows above all and in all and through all of existence.

Other posts on the blog continue to get a decent amount of traffic. Some of them are more on the "off-topic" side of the blog, like the one on my home office setup, or how to insert a Jupyter notebook into a WordPress post. Others are more directly on topic, like my discussion on AI and morality, or the role that evidence plays in Christianity. Overall, such posts fill out the rest of the usual long-tailed distribution, and do their part.

But I think there's still much more potential in these posts, and many others that lay undiscovered - and that brings me to the last component of my blog: all the things beyond just the content. In my second anniversary post, I said that I still felt like I didn't know what I was doing, in areas like marketing or infrastructure. Things have improved somewhat since then, but I think the sentiment still remains. I'm okay with the overall "look and feel" of the layout, but there is just so much to be done in terms of improving and fixing things, especially in the connectivity and discoverability between posts.

And then there's the whole question of marketing the blog, at which I'm still largely ineffective. I've decided some time ago that I'm bad at marketing - not just for this blog, but in life, in general. Like many technically minded people, I had dramatically underestimated its importance, and it took me a while to understand that marketing is useful, and can even be good - as in, morally righteous - when it's done properly. Now, realizing this doesn't make me any better at it, but it gives me the direction for me to improve in.

But all that, I feel, is the current state of my blog. I still have tons of things to say, and tons of things to improve, even as I feel I've accomplished great things thus far. Here's to decades more of my continuing endeavor - may the Lord my God look upon it with favor, and establish the work of my hands.

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