5 Years on Dreamwidth. What I've Written About.

[canyonwalker]

It's my 5 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 14 years ago. (My first post was very in media res.) And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics from there. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 3437 blogs in 5 years and 646 in the past 12 months. That's an average of 1.77 posts per day this past year, down from 1.92 last year. Yeah, this year has been a bit slower for me in terms of writing than years past. I've remarked on various reasons why. Those reasons range from dispiriting things happening (including just being sick) to engaging in fewer activities than normal because of an injury to just not even caring. 😰 But hey, enough melancholy.

One thing I enjoy using these anniversaries to do is checkpoint what I've written about. For starters, here are the Top Five topics I've written about in 5 years on Dreamwidth:

Top Topics, Past 5 Years

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	537
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	468
3	TV	279
4	Waterfalls	274
5	Weather	259

A few thoughts on this list:

• The tags "In Beauty I Walk" and "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" remain at the top of the list. That's appropriate as those are the foundational themes of my blog.


• I feel a little sad that TV has rocketed up to #3. Last year it came in at #6. I have mixed feelings about it because I'm thinking, Didn't I have anything better than TV to write about? But on the other hand, I did watch more TV this year than in the past. Not that that's even a lot. More on that later...


• Likewise, Weather seems like a lame thing to have on the leader board. I mean, people talking about the weather is kind of insipid. Blogging about it seems like the same. But the Weather tag got a lot of use this year because there were simply so many times that weather became a factor in something I wanted to do— sometimes as an opportunity, but most often an obstacle. And many times it was extreme weather I was writing about— which I call out is happening more frequently, and will continue to happen more frequently, because of human-caused climate change.


• I am satisfied that Coronavirus has fallen off the list. Last year it ranked #4, by this year it dropped all the way to #9 on the list of what I've written about over the past 5 years.

Now let's look at what I wrote about in the past 12 months:

Top Ten Topics, Past 12 Months

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	Planes Trains and Automobiles	123
2	Job	77
3	In Beauty I Walk	71
4 (tie)	No Rest for the Wicked	67
4 (tie)	TV	67
6	Taking it Easy	66
7	Dining Out	64
8	Better Call Saul	51
9	Waterfalls	50
10	Sales	47

A few remarks on Top Ten:

• Planes, Trains, and Automobiles climbed from 2nd place to 1st this year while In Beauty I Walk dropped from 1st to 3rd. I'm not sure what this swapping of places indicates.... Perhaps that I spent more time flying/driving than actually walking the past 12 months. 😂


• Job leapt up 8 places, from #10 to #2. That's not surprising as I had more than usual to say about my current job over the past 12 months— which included not just one but two troubling layoffs. Though I wasn't dismissed in either layoff, both prompted my thinking about when it'll be time for me to bow out.


• Better Call Saul roared onto the Top 10 list this year, coming from zero up to 51 posts. That helped propel TV up to the #4 spot. I actually don't watch much TV overall. Other than finishing Breaking Bad and watching all of Better Call Saul I watched barely any TV the past 12 months.

Here's the Second Ten list. I'll detail it out to show some where some topics that dropped off last year's Top Ten list landed as well as some topics that almost made it this year.

Second 10 Top Topics, Past Year

Rank	Tag	Uses
11	Being Sick Sucks	46
12	Weather	45
13	Around Home	41
14	Family	39
15	Pool Life	37
16	Road Trip!	36
17	WTF?	35
18	Italy	34
20 (tie)	Canada	32
20 (tie)	D'oh!	32

Some remarks on Topics #11-20:

• Being Sick Sucks climbed 4 spots this year, to #11. If it weren't for all the problems at my job it would've made the top 10. 🤮 And that's sad because who wants to see being sick on a Top Ten list? But the tag got a lot of uses the past 12 months. In that time I got Covid, my wife suffered a month-plus of a stomach virus that might have been a case of Norovirus the doctors refused to test for, and just recently my wife had foot surgery. It's been a shit year, health-wise.


• Weather actually dropped 8 slots this year, from #4 to #12. The sad thing is that's not because extreme weather and its harmful effects, driven largely by climate change, have lessened this year vs. last, but because with us Being Sick so often we've been less impacted by weather as we've sat inside. 😓 Notice also that Around Home made this year's list. Last year it didn't even place.


• Two country tags made this list. Canada I've visited before but not for a few years. This year we spent an enjoyable week in Canada. And this year we visited Italy for the first time! (I also visited Spain for the first time but so briefly that its tag only got 1 or 2 uses.)

Finally, what happened to Coronavirus? Not only did it drop out of the Top Five Overall, but in the past 12 months I tagged it to a paltry 9 blogs, dropping it all the way down to a tie at 69th place for the year. I'd say "Good riddance!" except most of those 9 posts about Coronavirus were about me getting Covid-19 last December. 😳 So now hopefully it's good riddance!