Happy Birthday To Me!

There it is.
It's been a year since I have created this blog.
I wrote 213 posts.
I didn't write 365 posts, one a day as I said I would.
But that was a bit of a crazy challenge to do anyway.
So overall I am not displeased with myself.

What do I retain from this first year experience?

• At first, I think I put a lot of pressure on myself to commit to one post a day or provide quality. 

             But as time passed, I grew relaxed and less judgemental of my work/blog.

• I "kind of" surprised myself by:

1. being able to produce something every two days or so.
2. following through with this commitment.
3. discovering I loved researching and writing about artworks, movies and history of a book/writer/artist in general.

Retrospectively, I think I lacked direction and focus but this is something you learn with time.

I also didn't realise it would take me so much time to research on how to improve your blog settings, and add widgets, read other blogs and write comments.

When I started this blog, my sole intent was to be consistent with my writing.
It was a personal challenge:
prove to myself that I was serious with writing by writing daily.
I knew nothing of blogging, didn't even visit other blogs, didn't even know blogging was so huge and widely spread.
I was oblivious to that world, living in a non-free blogosphere environment. ;-)
So I thought by creating just one post, it would be easy and fast, done and dusted in no time.

But of course, I got sucked in the process of blogging by trying to think of a better way to do things.
Improving is I guess one of our best traits we have as human beings.
One of which all blog-publishing service knew when they created this concept.


Nevertheless, I am glad as I learned a few things along the way.
One of the nice surprises was to discover what a strong and supportive community there is between writers.
I was also amazed at the incredible people/talent/books/sentences/images/words/blog designs that I noticed existed and found in the blogosphere throughout my virtual wanderings.

So overall a positive experience.

I know there're still a lot of things I'm doing wrong or could improve but I am not as much in a rush to get them done or pressured to do them as I used to. I'm not as efficient and organised as I could be but  I'll get there eventually or I hope to be anyway.

What about you? What did you look for when you started blogging?
And what did you learn about blogging or about yourself since you started blogging?
I'd like to know.