Allow me a self-congratulatory moment: this is my 1,000th blog post. It came as a bit of a surprise, as it’s not something I was tracking. When I enter the blog dashboard, I usually click on “Add new post” and leave once I’ve written it. WordPress shows you how many posts you have and one day, doing the math of the “published” and the “scheduled” and the “draft” and the “trash,” I noticed that those numbers were adding up to the high 3 digits.

Now, if you’ve followed this blog for some time know I’m not a huge believer in milestones for recognition. I once interviewed for an academic law library position and did not get it. One of the faculty who was on the hiring committee let me know that, although I’d written a lot, the writing was all “too short.” I’ve slowly gotten wordier over the years as well as more prolific. But I can’t say I really had a goal to write as much as I’ve had. I’m sorry?

A chart showing blog posts on this site, using WordPress, since 2011, by the number of words per year

In light of my reluctance around milestones, I wanted to make sure this was solid. I had migrated to WordPress back in 2011 and moved over everything I had created to that point. Most of the content was blog posts but not all of them were things I was thrilled with.

As I found myself in the mid 900s, I started to go back over these older posts. Some I deleted. Some I updated, giving them correct dates (everything imported in 2011 had a March 2011 creation date). It was kind of fun. As some others have noted, you find writing that you’re a little embarrassed by. And you find links to things you’d forgotten about (and so I updated some links to make the posts still livable).

Unfortunately, I did have a technical slip up. When I removed all of the cruft and was ready to republish the revised subset, I didn’t want to spam my subscribers. If you’re a subscriber, you can get an email with each post. I thought that I’d turned off the email function but, unfortunately, I was wrong. You faithful subscribers had an inbox full of emails from me. Apologies were made, one lawyer acted a bit of a jerk and was unsubscribed, and everyone moved on. Thanks for those who were gracious and stuck around!

After that, though, the cleanup was done and I felt like I had a pretty solid body of posts. It was great to be added to the Canadian Law Blogs Hall of Fame this year. That’s the sort of recognition I can get behind, although I was still thinking about closing in on 1,000 posts.

As I often do, I’m writing this in advance of the post date. If all has gone well, I’ve just driven across country with the help of one of our kids. I’ve moved in and am going to show up to a new job today. Who knows, I may take a week off from blogging!

Thanks to those who stumble upon my web site looking for crafts, or how to build an Irish dance stage, for those wondering how to create heat maps, and all of my law library colleagues. I might keep blogging without an audience but it certainly gives me that extra boost to share, when I know there are people who might get some value out of it.

Thank you for reading.