I intend to establish a practice of writing an annual letter to my readers – to review the year gone by, to acknowledge lessons learned for the future, and provide an outline of where I intend to take this blog in the year or years to come.
This is the first letter in what I expect to be a long series of annual letters.
Review of 2019
I am incredibly pleased with getting this the blog off the ground seizing the moment when I felt inspired and acted on the inspiration immediately.
Activities involved selecting and registering a domain name, hosting the blog, learning and configuring WordPress, selecting a Theme, and finally going live on 11th Aug 2019.
Writing
I went live with this first article on the blog. Sigh! I have kept it and a few others as a reminder of my humble beginning and the journey I have had in the last few months. Focus with the blog was on getting started instead of starting only when perfect!
I started by posting articles to help my readers discover someone else’s content. Since then, I have evolved to researching and writing my content.
Writing evolved from virtually tweet/quote form to blog form, with articles now ranging from 500 to 1,500 words. Words are coming more naturally whenever I sit down to write.
I wrote the book review in the non-fiction genre, quickly followed by a book review in fiction and finally poetry. Reading and reviewing a poetry book is a significant milestone. Before this I had only read individual poems, but never an entire poetry book.
I have posted an article every week and intend to stick to this frequency going forward.
Key writing highlights in numbers:
- 66 blog posts, four pages published since going live on 11th Aug 2019 till the end of 2019.
- My word processor has counted 92,636 words reviewed in 2019. It is the gross word-count written and reviewed, and not the net word-count that appears in the blog or articles still in the draft stage. But it does give a sense of the effort I put in.
Readers’ Response
The response to the articles I have posted has far exceeded my expectations that were honestly quite minimal.
Most I hoped was for the blog to serve as an online journal of my musings with a few folks visiting. However, the readers’ curiosity to explore a new blog and their continuing faith have exceeded my wildest dreams. The reading stats and the feedback keep encouraging me to continue investing my time on the blog.
Readers’ overview in numbers in 2019
- There were 1,100+ unique visitors to the blog with 2,300+ page views across 1,700 visits since August 2019.
- Readers came from 291 places in 70 countries (I checked and there are 195 countries in total on this planet) covering all continents except Antarctica.
Popular articles in 2019 were
- 2019 Reading List
- A Happy Man Has No Past
- Inspirational Quotes on Work
- Inspirational Parenting Quotes and Advice
- The Art of Decision Making #1 – Judgement
- Energy is the Currency of the Universe
- Poems for the Soul by Sanober Khan
- A Journey Into Your ‘Self’
- Think and Win like Dhoni by Sfurti Sahare – Book Review
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson – Book Review
Channels
From what started with posting the links on Whatsapp in August, with mostly friends and family visiting, the distribution has gradually expanded to other social media channels.
The response has been incredible on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Telegram.
Twitter hasn’t been so great – the blog form and tweet form are miles apart, and condensing content to tweet form required more time than I could invest and also took focus away from writing. During the last week of December, I have set up an application to tweet a curated list of my reading highlights every hour. It runs 24 x 7 x 365 and tweets a snippet of something I liked during my reading safari. You can follow me on Twitter handle @reading_guru to access it. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can bookmark this page that shows my Twitter timeline.
Even more surprising has been the amount of traffic coming from Search Engines after enabling SSL (Secure HTTP) protocol in late August 2019. Near about 1/4th of readers now come via online searches, vast majority from Google, but a few from Bing and Baidu too!
In summary, the takeaway from me is that there are readers for good content, who are curious enough to experiment with something new and will keep visiting so long as the content remains relevant.
Reading
I continue to read lots of books.
I read 23 books (it should be 25, but Goodreads counted the Mars Trilogy as one book) covering 6,870 pages in 2019. It doesn’t include several books that I abandoned as they failed to retain my interest.
You may say that’s not too bad, but in fact, this is down from 45 books and 17,132 pages in 2018. Last year the focus was mostly fiction that I usually run through at a face pace, but this year had non-fiction and also poetry that does take a while to go through.
I am aiming higher in 2020, but more on that a bit later.
I recently published my 2019 Reading List, and it is the most popular page on my blog so far. I intend to keep updating a 2020 Reading list as clearly readers are looking for suggestions on what to read. Bookmark and keep visiting the Reading List link on the menu.
Learning
I have gone through a steep learning curve over the last few months and involved learning:
- Amazon Web Services – I host my blog on AWS and use Lightsail (compute), S3 (storage), Lambda (serverless application model for my Twitter application), Route53 (Domain names and DNS configurations), Billing Dashboard (the blog doesn’t generate revenue, so need to keep an eye on the costs) to name a few.
- WordPress – Configuration, Administration, Themes, Theme-builders, Plugins, etc.
- Python – I had learned it a few years back while dabbling in AI/ML, but built on top of it to put an application live on AWS Lambda.
- Software Upgrades – In late October, I caused a noticeable cosmetic issue on my blog during a WordPress upgrade. Thankfully, with the back up taken just before the update, and Amazon Web Services’ amazing capabilities, I was able to move the blog to a brand new server in 15 minutes. Clearly, I should have known better and been more careful. In late December, I revamped the look and feel of the blog, but also established the process for technical updates so that all changes are reversible to avoid disruption to the readers.
- Security – This has been an eye-opener. My harmless non-political blog still has 100+ hacking attempts every single day – brute-force attack to crack the admin password, scan for vulnerable pieces of software, etc. It is a scary world we have entered in.
- Privacy – I don’t capture personally sensitive information on the blog. However, creating privacy and terms and conditions pages made me aware of new aspects of data privacy that I hadn’t previously focused on consciously.
Goals for 2020
Its always good to have goals that you can aim for during the year. However will fine tune this as the year progresses.
Writing
I intend to write one article per week at a minimum. So you should expect a minimum of 52 pieces in 2020.
Another goal I have set for myself is to write at least 2,000 words per week to add up to 100,000 words by the end of 2020 (net word count on the blog though not sure yet how I am going to track it).
The content will comprise of two primary categories below.
1. Books
Reading Lists
Apart from my annual reading lists, I plan to create categorized reading lists to help readers select their next read covering fiction and non-fiction and a few genres within them. You can expect more like the 2019 Reading List.
Book Summaries and Books Reviews
The summaries or reviews are to help readers see a little bit under the hood of the book before making their own purchase and reading decision. The summaries obviously will not be a substitute for reading the entire book.
I intend to write a book summary for every book I read and also provide a link from Reading Lists to the relevant book summaries for non-fiction and reviews for fiction.
I participate in the annual Goodreads challenge by setting up a reading goal – I have an ambitious target of 52 books for 2020 (1 per week). I got off to a good start with four already done at the time of writing this article.
2. Personal Growth
You would have noticed there is an increasing flavour of personal growth and learning material in my articles.
I will be expanding on this in 2020, focusing on
- Content suitable for readers beginning their working life and those around midway through like me.
- Aspects that helped me since the beginning of my career (things that I think I did well on)
- Aspects that I am aware of now but did not know when I started my career (things I would have done differently had I known about them).
I have put up a brief outline of topics I intend to cover and would love to hear feedback and suggestions.
Readers and Channels
I intend to continue to focus on current social media channels.
I do intend to start a weekly newsletter in the first quarter of 2020. I expect the newsletter to contain –
- One article published that week
- One book recommendation
- A few curated list of links to external content from my reading safari that may be of interest to my readers
- A couple of insightful reading highlights.
Operational side
The technical and other operational aspects of the blog are adequately scaled to support traffic for the foreseeable future and have the flexibility to scale up at short notice, so not expecting too much to happen on this front.
I may review and revise the look and feel again for more flexibility than the current Theme allows.
Anything else I intend to address it comes.
Partners
I am incredibly grateful for the fantastic tools available to bloggers – Amazon Web Services (hosting), Bitnami (WordPress image), Automattic (WordPress), readwise.io (reading highlights), Grammarly (word processing), Notion.so, Google (Analytics and Search Console), Facebook (page), Canva (image editing), Unsplash (professional-grade stock images), and a few more.
New Year 2020 and New Decade
I am incredibly grateful to my readers for the impressive response in 2019. I promise the year 2020 will be even better on content. Keep visiting.
I am grateful to all the partners and their amazing products that are so critical to folks like me who want to share their musings and passion with like-minded people around the globe.
Thank you, and I wish you all a happy and fulfilling 2020 and a great decade ahead.
Satyajit Jadhav
8 Jan 2020
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