The calendar shows 2012, marking an incredible 10 years of (archived) blogging for me. I’ve actually been doing it for longer than ten years, I think I started when I attended college in Grimstad back in 1998. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand that what I wrote might actually have some sort of historical significance for myself until early 2002 when I started taking proper care of archiving every rambling bit.

And it’s been quite a bit rambling. From January 7, 2002, until December 31, 2011, I’ve published a total of 1656 entries: 424 772 words, ranging from short, one paragraph outbursts to several pages of emotional beans being spilled all over the floor. For comparison, the first four books in the Harry Potter series contain a total of 459 978 words, just a mere 30 000 more. Had I only made about half the money J. K. Rowling did on the series as well. I’m using about one and a half hours on average on each entry, meaning that I’ve spent 103 and a half days, or almost three and a half months writing stuff very few people read. And that does not include the countless hours I’ve spent on activities related to the site: Programming, theming, building, administrating, configuring, tweaking.

Surely time that could have been better spent, but for me it’s been great. The therapeutic factor has been high and just that has been necessary at times - some of the entries has been very personal.

Since 2002 I’ve traveled the world, had three girlfriends, lived with two girls, gone on dates with about a dozen or so others that really didn’t lead to anything except for a lot of hilarious stories and a good (but somewhat distant) friend, changed jobs at least four times and moved homes more often than I care to remember. Stuff like that tends to bring out the personal entries. The number of these entries decreased greatly when I met my second girlfriend, though, since I knew she was reading everything - and just reading my gibberish could easily lead to some unpleasant misunderstandings. Now the entries tend to be more about the world, life and everything in general, and not that focused on myself.

To get an idea of what I’ve actually been writing about, I fed every entry from 2002 to 2012 through Wordle, a nifty service that creates beautiful word clouds. The most frequently used words are bigger than the words used less frequently. Note that Wordle automatically filters out common English words. Here is the result:

I have to admit that I was a bit nervous about the result, because I ran the risk of looking like a total ass. What if “tit” was my most frequently used word? Thankfully, it looks like the words I use the most are mainly positive words: “Good” and “like” are two words that stand out. Good. I like that.

So, will I keep this up? As it looks right now, I will. Some entries will be better than others, there will be a few redesigns, more one-liners added to the collection, things being checked off The List, the occasional server downtime and the general mess you’ve come to expect if you are a regular visitor.

I’m hoping to be able to read through the archive in 40 years and realize that I’ve lived a perfectly average, but still pretty awesome life, laugh of every stupid thing I did and be proud of the odd stroke of genius.