On breaking records

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Fireworks over Knights Point State Park, Vermont, July 3, 2022, by Howard Fielding. Offered under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

I’ve never been much of a sportsman or a businessman, so breaking records has never meant much to me.

Even when I was in the news business, they always seemed rather pointless–just another news hook or bit of publicity. After all, the old saying “records were meant to be broken” seemed so obvious. Why write about them?

And some records are always going to be broken, especially if it’s a sequential thing. For a blogger who has published 100 posts, of course Post 101 is going to be a record-breaker.

They have their value, though, in chronicling human achievements or meteorological phenomena. When someone sets a world record or the heat in the UK starts melting the tarmac at airports, it’s worthy of headlines.

So it’s a modest achievement for me to note that as of noon today, this blog has had more visitors in 2022 than in the full 12 months of any previous year. That’s largely because of more the frequent and shorter posts that I started doing in January.

This is still but a tiny speck in the great blogosphere. Many bloggers have more visitors in a morning that I have in a year.

Still, I have to admit, it feels good to see the bar charts. And if that’s what is meant by “personal best,” then there’s no place to go but up!

3 thoughts on “On breaking records

  1. Well, some folks prefer longer reads…especially when it takes 4 times longer to comment than to read your post. Finish the book! Nevertheless, I enjoy your writing.

  2. Thanks, Celeste! It’s partly a time management thing. A short blog post takes about an hour, more or less, to do properly–write, illustrate, headline, proof, schedule, etc. I can do that anywhere I have access to my computer (or even on my phone).

    Files, notebooks, drafts, and supporting research for the book are in my Vermont office, one of the few places I have where I can also set aside the time large blocks of time to work. I’m planning on spending time there this summer. Stay tuned.

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