In the mayhem and chaos that has been the month of February, I have to confess that I completely missed a major milestone for jeffreytharp.com. You see, February 13th was the two year anniversary of landing here on WordPress and making the leap into hosting and managing my own domain. I don’t mean to make that sound more complicated than it really was. Basically all that means is I registered the site, pointed it towards WordPress, and then set up a few widgets. Oh, and then paid for the privilege of not advertising someone else’s service as part of my web address. Everything costs, even here on the internet.

What I’m trying to say here is that two years ago, I got serious about writing for the first time. I’ve always had the bug, but this is where I found my voice and turned something I’d largely been doing for myself into something that would be seen by an audience. That’s a huge step, even when the audience is mostly made up of family, friends, and a few random people that discover you by accident. Writing here has led into other opportunities to contribute and work with other writers and to take on other “spare time” projects that I wouldn’t otherwise have attempted.

Writing is a deeply introspective act. It’s a force for refining and clarifying where you stand and who you are. It’s also a tremendously time consuming pain in the ass. I’m glad I’ve never stopped to calculate the amount of time it takes to churn out four or five new posts a month, let alone what it’s taken to throw in on those other projects. I can see now why it’s only the one in a million who ever make any money doing this. I have a new appreciation for even the worst of the hack writers who have managed to scrape out a living based on the written word.

I’ll resist the temptation to go into the usual list of statistics and just say that it’s been a good two years. Site visits are up, comments are up, and pretty much any meaningful metric is up from this point a year ago. Writing in a lot of ways is its own reward, but knowing there are people out there interested in what you have to say is decidedly a feather in my cap. Thanks for sticking with me. Let’s see how things look a year from now.