Well, I've officially been blogging forever, in Internet Years. Here's my first post, from April 16th, 2002.
"Well, it's up. After screwing with FTP permissions on and off for a week, my weblog is up. Sigh, I'm blogging. We'll see how long it lasts."
What a powerful first post. Moving, really. ;) A harbinger of great things.
I noticed a kind of a pattern in the numbers next to the Months, like September 2007 (21), and graphed it real quick. Looks like I post an average of 32 posts a month over the last 5 years, with outliers clipped (a trimmed mean). I started slow, with just 21 posts in the first six months, then something happened. Somewhere in October of 2002, I found my blog's (first) voice, did 44 posts, and haven't shut up since. The max? An obnoxious 64 posts in June of 2004 - of widely varying quality, but a few classics that get lots of traffic today.
I started on Radio Userland as a blogging platform, then decided a few short months later that it wasn't working for me. I moved to DasBlog in September of 2003, and posted about how to redirect all my old content and comments.
Aside, my original Radio blog is still out there, as Radio won't let you 301/302 your links, but the template included a META redirect and a Javascript timed redirect, and I've imported ALL that content into DasBlog (hence some of the funky generated titles - there was a time when Radio let you post to your blog without titles) and you'll get auto-redirected to the same post.
Now, I've got 1914 posts, counting this one. I may start doing a "greatest hits" or maybe a Popular Posts link so folks can come straight to the 10-15 posts they most likely came looking for. What do you think? LifeHacker does a Retro Roundup each week. Kind of a "this day in history" post. I could probably do one once a month. Just a thought.
At any rate, the point of this post. I believe that a blog has a heartbeat. Mine, without me thinking about it is about 32 posts per month or 32ppm. I think it's probably good to have a consistent one, while the number isn't that important, the tempo is. There are some blogs I read that are 5ppm or less, but they make each post count. For example, Atwood's blog is consistently about 20ppm (guess) but they are 90% gold. Slashdot's is hundreds of ppm but I've stopped caring.
What is your Blog's Heartbeat? What's your Blog's PPM?
You can click on that ppm image above for a Paint.NET layered file if you want to make your own PPM image.
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.