One Hundred Blog Posts!

 This post is the 100th post on this blog - a bit of a milestone, to be sure. So this will be a bit of a meta-post, talking about the blog itself.

Of those 100 posts, about 40 were made between April 19, 2019 (when the blog started) and June of this year (just before MicroCon), which averaged about 8 posts a year. After MicroCon, I decided to get "serious" (for certain values of the word) about my social media presence, and decided on (among other things) a regular posting schedule. Originally I had a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, but switched it to Tuesdays and Fridays so that I could also do twice-weekly Instagram posts (MEDALS Mondays and Travel Thursdays), plus minor Wednesday posts on Tumblr and Facebook (where I currently have zero and six followers respectively). And, when I remember, I post a link to the newest blog post over on Bluesky (where I have 25 followers).

My blog posts seem to average around 20 to 25 views, although a blog post I did that provided some advice on starting your own micronation has 74 views, last time I checked. This is probably because, whenever anyone in the micronational Facebook groups posts "How do I start my own micronation?" I respond with a link to that post.

I usually try to include at least one related picture in each post, like the one at the bottom of this post. I started doing this so the blog post thumbnail wouldn't just be the first letter of the text in the post, but it also helps when I repost somewhere else - things with pictures always seem to garner more attention than things that don't have a visual accompaniment. I think I've used an AI-generated picture exactly once in a post, because I didn't have any other pictures to hand that fit the theme of the post.

Speaking of AI, I don't use AI to generate the post - these are my words, not those of some "answer machine". I know some people seem to think that AI is the inevitable future. Well, if that does happen, then maybe human-generated content will be a valuable niche, like how handmade products are in vogue in an era of factory-manufactured goods?

I don't currently make any money off of this, or any other social media. I did try to "monetize" this blog via Google Ad Network - twice. Both applications were rejected because Google considered this to be a "low-content blog". They don't provide any guidance as to what that means, they just say "Fix it and you can re-apply." As near as I can tell, they came to that decision because I often include external links to other sites, which is bizarre to me - in my academic career, providing references is a must, but apparently bloggers aren't supposed to do that?

When I started, I had a good list of blog post ideas, and I was able to build up a queue of posts. Those have all been posted now, and some days it's a bit of a struggle to find something to say - which is probably not helped by Google's claim that this is a "low-content blog". (But, you know, I'm not bitter or anything like that.) With the recent sequence of posts about micronational intelligence services, I've got a few new ones queued up now, just about to the end of the year in fact.

Anyway, 100 posts later, I'm still here, and I haven't run out of things to say yet! As I said, I'll probably delve more into micronational intelligence services in the near future, because (even though you probably don't need one) it's something I have some knowledge of (for, you know, reasons) and something that seems to be interesting to others.

Picture Source: Microsoft Word ClipArt Finder