Curtis McHale has invited his readers to write about their blogging history, so here's mine.

My initial dip into blogging was about 5 years ago with the then rising star of blogging platforms, Posterous. I started a blog with the great intention of posting at least once a week. What I was going to write about I was unsure which in turn led me to actually posting to my blog very infrequently. A bit of a false start then.

MindMapSwitch

With no fixed topic in mind and a checkered past of a software career with no expert knowledge in any one programming language or framework, I looked back at the other skills and experience I earned from my career. One particular topic jumped out at me. Mind mapping. This was the moment when my mind mapping blog, MindMapSwitch, was born.

I ran the blog on Posterous and kept the blog going with frequent updates in the region of once a week. After 18 months of posts I got to the point where I simply couldn't write anymore about MindMapSwitch. Rather than struggle on with finding new content on a limited topic with a limited audience, I decided to cease writing anymore posts for MindMapSwitch. The blog itself was eventually removed from the Internet with the shutdown of Posterous but I do have a back up of MindMapSwitch's posts.

From that point I moved on to focusing my attention on my own two blogs. I kept a blog for short essay style posts and I kept another blog for link posts. Both were initially hosted on Posterous, but I did move the blogs to Octopress for a short time and then onto Squarespace for a while.

Back to Octopress

At the start of this year I decided to bring the two blogs together and migrate back to using Octopress again. The pull to writing in Markdown and having more control over my blog was what I actually wanted rather than trying to dissect the templating language of another blogging host.

Faced with the start of a career working independently, I wanted my blog to the first thing people would see when they searched for me. At the same time I committed to writing an article every week day. Since doing this I've been steadily churning out content that been increasing my audience on a monthly basis.

Time for the stats

I used Google Analytics for over four years for my blogs, but since deleting my Google account, I've had to move to a different service for collecting my web traffic stats. I settled with Github's Gauges service in April this year. Although I've lost the stats from my Google account, it hasn't been until this year that my traffic stats have started to get really interesting.

Since April I've managed to increase my visitors and page views each month and last month I broke the 1000 page views milestone in a month. I'm also using my stats to spot patterns in popular content that I should consider writing more about. Popular content over the last few months have included articles on productivity, text editors and using Octopress, but by far my most popular post is about switching to Feedbin.

Where to from here?

So where do I go from here? My posting schedule of short essay style posts on the weekdays is working well for me, so I'm not going to change that anytime soon. I also usually post short link posts on a Monday and Friday which I will continue to do. I've got plans to include popular content pages for my blog and also write more technical posts around programming and software development.

I suppose the key thing is that I have found something that works. I'm happy with my posting schedule, my content and my choice of blogging tools.

I'm just another person trying to carve out a niche on the Internet really with their blog. As long as I'm gaining more and more interested readers, I'll keep posting.