Year One.

Exactly a year ago, I published the very first post of Digital Crossings and committed to publishing at least one post every Tuesday. And I did it.

I started Digital Crossings for several reasons. First was the fact that I was a “fallen” writer. Having produced a huge amount of verbiage in university, it was virtually a sin that post graduation my writing had become as good as nonexistent. So this blog was an attempt to get writing again. Regularly. The second reason is that in returning to writing, I wanted to ease into it with a fairly “easy” subject. My history of writing includes poetry, fiction and Christian articles. I needed to build up some literary “muscle” – get a feel for the art of the pen again before going on to these types of writing again. As an IT professional, writing tech stuff for non-techies felt safe.

At the same time I did have something of a mission to do a tech blog that was accessible to non-techies. Blogs like Startups Nigeria and their ilk specifically target the technorati. I wanted this to be for people who interact with technology all the time, but do not necessarily know or care about concepts like “Cloud Computing” or “Web 2.0”. The writing was easy. Getting an audience hasn’t been, but the writing is its own reward.

Along the way I made new friends, encountered great technology, discovered great blogs, thought about quitting (lots of time), gotten home from work exhausted and with no incentive to write and written anyway, tried to get other writers for this blog (and failed), promised to create new segments and new points of focus (and didn’t do it), and surprised myself that I could actually do something like this with consistent regularity (if not necessarily consistent quality).

I guess what I am trying to say is that it hasn’t been as great I hoped it would be, but I have enjoyed writing this blog and succeeded at the main things I set out to do.

So where to from here? Even as I write this, I really, really want to say that I’m quitting this and moving on to other challenges. However, Yahoo has already debited my account for this domain name, so I might as well use it. I would like to get into some serious tech writing (the kind that would make my current target audience’s eyes glaze over) and get back to writing fiction and on other subjects. I will definitely start doing other writing on the web for myself and for others and pursue other tech projects.

The way I’m carrying on, you would think I had been doing this blog for twenty years, rather than one year. I’ll stop now and just give the stats:

• 1 Year.
• 63 Posts.
• 1,576 Page views.
• 544 absolute unique Visitors.
• 37 Comments (mine included).
• 48 Countries and 212 cities accessed from.

I’ll conclude by thanking you for being a part of the first year and listing what I consider to be the 7 most important posts (in no particular order) I have written – and two of them are not about technology.

1. Let Me Take You to School.
2. Sit Up Straight: Your Life May Dependent On It.
3. Road Kill.
4. From a Hospital Reception, Waiting.
5. The Great Firewall of Africa.
6. Complete and Utter Garbage.
7. Then there’s Jos.

Dej.

Image Courtesy of Wshooi at Flickr.com