Five hundred posts is a milestone of some kind, right? At least it feels that way to me. When I launched version Six.5 of this site, there were only around 420 posts or so. That was just two months ago, and now I’m halfway to a thousand! I worried back in April that the new format and the writer-friendly Movable Type software would make it difficult for me to be able to keep posting to this site daily; together, the two changes practically demanded lengthier entries.

Compare last month’s posts with those from May 2001 and May 2002: the quickly-generated Excel chart below clearly illustrates the fairly dramatic change in the nature of my writing. Not only am I posting more often, but my logorrhea is apparently worse than ever; the average daily word count for my posts began at 61 in 2001,inched upwards to 81 in 2002, and skyrocketed to 258 in 2003. Not only that, for May 2003 my year-over-year, total word count increase was 575% over the same period twelve months ago!

All statistical trivia aside, I’m proud that I’ve actually been sustaining this level of posting. It has been a struggle, though, requiring lots of discipline. Often I’ll find myself looking at the clock at 11:00p and feel that I’d sooner just watch some tube than do any writing, but having set a kind of precedent for myself, I’m reluctant to skip even a day of blogging. Of course it happens from time to time, but less often than in years past.

One added benefit of maintaining Subtraction.com is that, as an outlet for my thoughts and ideas, it keeps me focused and engaged. Overall, I’m more enthusiastic about the Web than ever, spending more time exploring its new corners than I was even a year ago, and generally more excited about working in this medium than ever, probably. If nothing else, blogging gets that right.