When Five Hundred Posts You Reach

… look this good you will not. But man, I tell you, the memory goes.

In the July 1985 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov wrote:

Yesterday I sat down to write my 321st essay for Fantasy and Science Fiction. […] It went swimmingly. I was pleased at the ease with which I worked out its construction. It practically wrote itself and I scarcely had to look anything up. I whistled while I worked. And then, when I reached the last page and launched into my climactic paragraphs, I thought to myself: Why does this suddenly sound familiar to me? […] Hoping earnestly that my memory had misfired, I looked it up. It turned out to be essay #182, first published in the December 1973 issue. There it was. That earlier essay was essentially what I had just written.

The other day I wrote a blog post. It went great. It was strongly opinionated and about an interesting topic. I did a web search to make sure that I had a particular fact straight and… I found my own previous article on the subject. Apparently the late Dr. Asimov and I have at least one thing in common. (I also have something in common with writer Neil Gaiman, but that’s another story.)

It seemed to me looking back that I started off with a huge backlog of old emails answering real user questions which I could use for blog articles, and indeed, when I got started there, I was posting a couple a day. And then over the years I both got busy with other things (writing and editing books, for example) and ran out of canned emails to turn into blog posts, so my rate of writing dropped off. And then lately it seems like I’ve gotten more of a groove back and am doing a couple a week.

I decided to see whether my memory was correct by computing the twenty-post moving average of number of days between successive posts: (Yes, I am a geek, but you already knew that.)

Yep, I think in this case my memory was correct.

Five hundred posts from me and six thousand comments from you all in less than six years seems like rather a lot. I want to take this opportunity to say thanks to everyone who has given me great feedback, interesting questions and technical and moral support over the years. You rock.

Enough chit-chat. On to more fabulous adventures!