Today is my 1st Blogversary!

To celebrate the first anniversary or blogversary (in the blogging world lingo) of this blog site, this post is all about reminiscing what have transpired over the past year.

As an NBA fanatic with Shaquille O’Neal as my favorite player, it’s a no-brainer that my first-ever post on this site is related to them. That post was the beginning of my journey to rediscover my passion for writing. Although I don’t write daily, I’m still amazed to know that in 365 days, I have written 65 posts. That’s an average of about 1 post every 5.6 days or roughly once every week. Not bad I think considering that I get to write only once or twice every issue when I was the editor-in-chief for our school paper during my elementary and secondary days.

In my post titled Why Blog?, I explained that the original reason why I took up blogging is because I was encouraged by a fellow NBA trading card collector when we met at Davao. Thanks for that Carlo! As a student, he was earning some money just by blogging. That persuaded me to also try it. I registered at various blog advertising web sites hoping that they’ll tap me to write reviews on their advertisers. Since all of them want a blog site to be at least three months old and have a minimum of ten posts, I spent the next few weeks writing on diverse topics. Five months later, I was paid $20 when made a post about Payperpost. That was some extra money I used to buy some NBA trading cards.

However, that was my first and only earning as the more I blog, the more I realized that this isn’t about the money. The money is just a bonus. I’m blogging now not to earn but to share to others random thoughts culled from the deep recesses of my existence. My posts are generally lengthy so as not to bore my readers, I always try to include pictures. Consequently, this allowed me to develop my picture-taking and photo-editing skills.

In a year, there were 8, 200 visitors to this site. That’s an average of 683 visitors per month or 23 visitors per day. Not too many but at least, I’m not just some idiot here sharing my thoughts to no one. It sure feels good to have some company especially if the visitors write some comments on my blogs. It also helped that I exchanged-links with fellow bloggers and joined blog promotion web sites.

My most popular post is about Doraemon and his witty quotes and was written in Filipino. Since writing that last August 17, 2008 there were 2, 835 visits to that post or an average of 19 visits per day. Surely, this post is one of the major draws to my site.

My birthday greetings post to my wife got the most number of comments. I left a message to my friends in the blogosphere through their site’s message box and sent an SMS message to my friends in the real world to help me greet my wife. They responded by posting 32 birthday greetings much to my wife’s surprise.

In one year, these were the most prevalent topics I have written:

1. A series of blogs titled Our Wedding Chronicles narrating the events last 2007 that led to my wedding with my wife Wendy last December 22. This is not yet finished. I still have to write about the reception, the souvenir giveaways, the gifts, the post-wedding travels and the documentation. This might be a little “OA” you might think but I just want to have something that will refresh my memory later on when reminiscing the past. I can also share this to our future kids.

2. My fascination to the game of basketball especially the NBA and my idol, Shaquille O’Neal. In fact, majority of my posts were about them.

3. My fascination with boxing especially with our national pride, Manny Pacquiao.

4. My fascination with UFC and my hero, Randy Couture.

5. My collection of various stuffs ranging from NBA trading cards to action figures to key rings.

6. My adventures with Wendy and our family and friends. In one year, we tried wall climbing at Kiwa Adventure, took a bath at the hot springs of Lake Agco, enjoyed the beach at Samal Island, watched the birds at Malagos Garden Resort, took a bath at the cold springs of Timoga and experienced whitewater rafting at Cagayan River.

7. Our sad tale when Wendy miscarriaged our supposed-to-be first child. My joy was replaced with grief over the incident.

8. I and Wendy are movie fanatics so I can’t help doing some movie reviews as well.

For the next year, I still intend to continue writing blogs. I may not earn anything from it but it’s a stress-reliever. It’s like taking a break after a hard day’s work. After all, around 80% of my posts were done at night before I sleep. As the old adage goes:

All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy.

See you on my next post!