Six Days Ago it Was Three Years

I got back from site last night and today I opened up my Outlook mail client. A reminder came up that I set for myself some time ago telling me that six days ago it was three years since I started my site.

Yep. I have been posting to this site for three years. Well … three years and six days to be precise.

I remember back when I started Abalook I read a whole pile of stuff from around the Web on blogging. I even purchased “The Dummies Guide to Starting a Blog” (or whatever it is called). I learnt things like: keep posts to a maximum of 500 words (which I sometimes try to do but I generally don’t worry too much about this rule anymore); and to always put some kind of picture with every post (which I used to to do, but like the 500 word rule I don’t really bother much about this either these days); and to use Word or some online service to make sure your posting’s Flesch reading ease is under 55 and the Flesch grade is no higher than 7 (and I actually used to check the Flesch readability score before posting articles when I started, but I don’t do that much anymore—sometimes but rarely).

But one of the things I read that I was very aware of in the early days of my site was that 85 percent of people who start blogs don’t get past five months of regular postings and half of the remaining 15 pecent don’t make it past a year.

Well I have made it well past five months. I have made it to 36 months—although I will admit that my posting rate has declined heavily over the last two months. But the main thing is that I am in the 7.5 percent of people who make it past that first year of posting.

Just for fun I just Flesched this posting in Word and the reading ease is well over 55 (it is 67.4) and it got a grade level of 10.3 which means you need to have completed 10.3 years of school in order to be able to read and understand what I have written here. So this posting fails the Flesch limit of 7 rule for blog postings.

Even so, hopefully anyone reading this can understand what I am saying.

Writing has always interested me. When I was about 16 I typed a 100 page book using an Olympia portable typewriter my mum bought me.

In my time I have done two copy editors courses (one for technical editing and the other for user manual editing) and numerous writing courses including “Writing for the Reader” at WAIT way back when WAIT was called WAIT (Western Australia Institute of Technology) before it was called Curtin University. I am hoping that what I picked up from these courses has helped me make what I publish here more or less understandable; regardless of the Flesch scores.

And this post is almost the perfect 500 words (513 to be exact).