Marking 15 Years of Blogging!

I have always remembered that I began this blog in 2010. It came up recently in a conversation and prompted me to later look up when I did do that first post. Well, coincidentally, when on May 26, 2025 I checked my first post I was stunned to see it was exactly 15 years ago: May 26, 2010. 

Here is that modest first post “Time to Blog!” You have to start somewhere! I’m not able for some reason to edit this today. If I could I would pull up the text so it aligns better with the Great Egret photo. 

At that time I was getting into birding and the next year in 2011 I published my first book, “The Birds of Magnolia Cemetery: Charleston’s Secret Bird Sanctuary.” 
Summer 2024 I published a second edition of that first book. 

My new blog was a great place to aggregate and share bird types I was discovering at Magnolia cemetery (I helped the superintendent set up the cemetery's website- she bought the web address so the blogspot suffix could become net). 

Photographing and identifying birds became a hobby that would culminate in that book in 2011 and in 2016 another book featuring my bird photos and anecdotes from not only Charleston but around the U.S. and the Caribbean island we visited during summers back then. 

My “BirdsEyeViews” blog helped me organize all these birds and then easily find the images when needed for my books. 

Here’s another one of my early posts as I began thinking about taking pictures for the blog. Having an outlet for my photography was something I liked and still do. 

The emergence of smartphones with their cameras enabled picture-taking 24/7. See something unusual? Take a picture of it, as was the case here in June 2010.

My foray into blogging also influenced my teaching. At the College of Charleston I used this blog and had my students create their own blogs for my course “Beyond the Grave: What Old Cemeteries Tell and Teach the Living.” I taught this First Year Experience class for five years from 2015-2020. 

This experience set the path for my 2022 book, “Stories from the Underground: The Churchyards of Charleston.” 

When I began teaching at South Carolina State University in 2014 I started my Harwood Communications blog as a way to demonstrate writing, video and audio projects I have students do in different communication courses. 

For our SC State Communications Program I launched a site to promote our faculty, staff and students. 

The Blogger platform, owned by Google, is free and easy to use, easy to start when it is your time to blog. I have enjoyed turning students on to blogging and encourage them to customize them to showcase their styles, personalities and brands. 

Blogspot is the domain name that hosts Blogger blogs, hence the URL for my blog that ends with .blogspot.com. 

Ive always used the names Blogger and Blogspot interchangeably. But now I know and you know that there is a difference. 

438 and Counting! 

This 15th-anniversary post is my 438th since May 26, 2010. That’s a lot right? The blog archive (left) shows the number of posts each year. The years 2017 and 2022 share the lead with 44 posts each. 2021 is close behind with 43 and I did 42 posts in 2018. The fewest posts were in 2014 and 2015 with nine and 11 respectively. 

This post will be No. 12 in 2025. 

I do like Blogger’s organization this way. Note the “Search This Blog” feature (left). This allows people (and me) to find previous posts by inserting key words or label words that I add and that appear at the end of each post. “Blog anniversary” and “15 years” are label words I use for this post. 

I also have blog set to count pageviews. As you see the figure on June 6, 2025 at 6 p.m. is 392,749. Rounding off that figure to 400,000 finds approximately 2,220 views per month, meaning at least one photo on my blog is viewed by someone out there in cyberland. 

Interested in starting your own blog? Check out the homepage here. 

Blogger provides useful statistics and analytics. One I had not looked at for some time is this one, my top 10 posts by page views.

No. 1 by far with 26,900 views is my “Birds of Aruba” posted on May 25, 2013. 

In second place with almost 12,000 views is my March 2012 feature on the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia. 

A surprise hit was my “Murdaughs of Magnolia Cemetery” piece in December 2021 with nearly 7,750 views. The Alex Murdaugh murder case was a huge news story locally and nationally. I did not publicize my post at all but people found it and circulated it!  The post also has a very nice comment at the end of it. 

Here I am finishing this post. Normally, I write my posts on my iPad where I keep all of my photographs. But to do the embedded links I always include (as many as possible for analytics purposes) I must go up to the home office and do those links on my laptop there. 

Here's to 15 more years of blogging! Oh my, I'll be ??? years old by then!