I just realized that this past March marked 20 years of blogging for me. And so I checked my post count. I have 357 published posts on Pair-a-Dimes and 2,640 here on Daily-Ink (2,641 when I post this:). That’s just shy of 3,000 posts total.

What made me notice this is that I looked at my LinkedIn profile after someone commented on my post there. At the end of next month I’ll be retired from the school board and another ‘job’ will move up to the top of my ‘Experience’ column. It will be “Open Thinker”. Somewhere around 15 years ago I added this job to LinkedIn, and put the start date as the first month of my first blog post, March 2006.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been openly sharing my thoughts for that long. Just yesterday while chatting with my oldest she told me she was sharing the size of my digital footprint with a new friend. We discussed how I say, ‘my oldest’ and don’t regularly use her name because I don’t think it’s fair to her that if a future employer Googles her name, what would come up are dozens of her dad’s blog posts that include her name. Her openness online should not default to my choices to share. That said, I’m still on her first page if you search her name.

I’m not changing my open writing and sharing any time soon. And next month I’ll probably take a good look at my ‘Open Thinking’ experience description on LinkedIn and revamp it.

Blogging has changed over the years. At one point it was an engagement machine, I’d routinely get 8, 10, 12, even 24 comments on a post. Now I get Likes on my Facebook page and LinkedIn, where I share my posts, and occasionally I get comments. Most people who engage with my writing don’t go to my actual blog. That’s perfectly ok, my only disappointment with this is that comments on other platforms are not curated there the way comments are on a blog. Oh well… times change, tools change, use changes… but what hasn’t changed is that I’m still writing, and openly thinking, out loud on the internet.