As of today, I’ve been blogging for 10 years! Yay! Time for a retrospective.
I first started reading blogs around 2006, when I started college. I was a fan of the Bad Astronomy website which had funny material debunking the claim that the moon landing was a hoax, and other skepticism-related stuff. At some point I found that there was an associated blog called Bad Astronomy Blog. From there I branched off to other blogs, including The Friendly Atheist, Memoirs of a Skepchick, Pharyngula, and the ScienceBlogs network.1 After reading these for a while, I decided to start my own skeptical/atheist blog. I called my blog Skeptic’s Play because I was bad at coming up with names.
I came bursting out of the gate, writing original content once per day. Obviously that wasn’t sustainable, but I think it goes to show that I always had a strong motivation to write, which is probably the most important determinant of long-term success in blogging.
However, it was immediately clear that I wasn’t cut out for skeptical blogging. To be a good skeptical content creator, you either have to know stuff, research stuff, or else you have to not give a shit and just be entertaining. I gave a shit, but didn’t give quite enough shit to spend significant amounts of time researching every bullshit claim. I ended up writing about a lot of low-hanging fruit, like logical fallacies and elementary philosophizing. I also wrote about physics, math puzzles, and atheism.
