This is the 53rd weekly post, so in theory – given that a year has 52 weeks – this blog should be ONE YEAR OLD! The math sounds irrefutable and yet…
I am not questioning the numbers of weeks in a year – 52 weeks plus one (or two) day(s) to be accurate – nor my posting schedule (every Thursday). So, how old is the captain?
Let me explain my own mathematical problem, which has nothing to do with the one of Gustave Flaubert1. As suggested by the title of this post, it has to do with Beyond anniversary (or “blogoversary” as seen on the Web). How old is this blog?
What about the domain name?
This would be the easiest way to answer the question – for a website or, to be more accurate, a self-hosted website. Indeed, to create such a site, you need a domain name, a hosting provider and a platform. Hence, your website may be as old as either one of these elements (or none of them if you are using a development environment2). The age of my website is actually easy to determine as I registered my domain name with Gandi.net, get my web host from SiteGround and installed WordPress all within the same day. I even pointed my domain name to my website this very day. That is true for my website, but doesn’t apply to my blog, though!
My blog shared the same domain name, same hosting plan and same WordPress installation as my website. Still, Beyond is older than my website! How is this possible? For the reason that I created a separate site for this blog (see Adding a site to my Multisite network). Briefly, my hosting plan (StartUp) letting me run only one website, I had to create a Multisite network first – a feature, which allows multiple virtual sites to share a single WordPress installation. Admittedly, I could have created my blog within my website, but I decided to use a sub-domain approach instead (see A domain-based or path-based network?). Anyway, as a result, Beyond should be 10 days older than my website.
However, if you take into consideration the date when I unchecked the Search Engine restriction in WordPress, it would be even older than that. Yet, a blog without blog posts is not a blog!
What about the first post then?
Which one? In practice, I really have two “first posts”: Hello World! and The CogitActive Saga. The former is not the dummy “Hello World” post that comes with every WordPress installation, but an actual post. Nonetheless, it was more of a “coming-soon” kind of post than a “real” one; hence, a gap between its publication date and the time the latter post was published. Certainly, The CogitActive Saga post marks the beginning of my weekly schedule for posting (uninterrupted since). Going back to the initial math, Beyond should therefore be 52 weeks old. That is not one year old yet!
Asynchronously
Earlier, I stated that the purpose of this blog is to unfold my podcasting adventure (almost) in real time
. Here the “almost” is important. Understandably, I had to do many things website-related before to be able to publish my first post. There are also many things not directly related to the creation of a website (e.g. graphics). Last, but not least, it is understood that several posts are about podcasting. As a matter of fact, The CogitActive Saga, which has 48 episodes3 so far, is not yet at the time when I published my first post.
Importantly, I try to cover each topic – in depth – in a distinct post. Not only I have chosen the path of most resistance for this project (see The CogitActive Saga), but also I consider every aspect of a problem before to take the most informed decision possible. This thorough approach involves gathering and reading all possible information on the subject matter. This takes a lot of time. Furthermore, writing in a foreign language is not that easy. No need to point out that I am neither a natural born blogger nor a native English speaker. For these reasons, I could not practically shortened my posting schedule!
Taken together, these concerns explain the asynchrony between the blog posts and reality. Eventually, the posts will catch up with the real life, though.
To sum up
While Beyond “blogoversary” is probably right now, my website anniversary is long overdue. With that reality come many maintenance tasks that I will cover in the coming posts. Of course, this will not improve the aforementioned asynchrony issue.
At the end of the day, the age of the captain probably doesn’t really matter. Still, I realize that time flies. I am looking forward to launching my podcast. Alas, after more than a year, I am still far from being done with all the initial settings (see The Who and the When).
1 See Age of the captain. ^
2 In theory, you want your website to be ready before going live. Indeed, you don’t want people (or Google bot) to see a half-baked site. To do so, you should use a development environment, or sandbox, which is only visible to you. Alternatively, if you don’t have such a feature, you can just check the box next to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” in the Reading Settings of your WordPress dashboard (see Configuring WordPress (Multisite) Settings). ^
3 Some posts were published in a well-timed manner (e.g. Gutenberg, Bye-bye Classic Editor and Domain Transfer – Should I?) and do not belong to The CogitActive Saga. ^
Joyeux anniversaire ! 🎈
Thank you for your wishes.