Last Saturday marked a special date for me. Of course, Saturday was News Weakly and Sunday was Father's Day, so I didn't get to this until today.
On Tuesday, June 20, 2006, I started this blog. Back then it was called Birds of the Air, because I had the bold, ambitious dream of writing about birds. Just birds. Nothing but birds. Ornithological purity.
And … well … that lasted about five minutes. Turns out you can only say so much about feathers before you start wandering into theology, culture, sarcasm, and whatever else crosses your mind while staring at a pigeon. So I changed the name to Winging It, which turned out to be far more accurate than I intended.
Twenty years later, here we are: 7,385 posts in 7,305 days. Yes, that’s more than one a day. No, I don’t know how it happened. I suspect sleep deprivation played a role. Or divine intervention. Or both. In that time, the blog has racked up almost 8 million views and more than a quarter of a million comments. I’m not a “super blogger” ... I’m more like the guy who accidentally wandered onto the stage and just kept talking until people started listening ... but I like to think I’m reaching every reader God intends me to … even the ones who got here by Googling something completely unrelated.
Speaking of which, here’s a fun mystery: on July 31, 2025, the blog had more than 1.8 million views. Why? I have no idea. Nothing special happened. I didn’t post a picture of a celebrity bird or solve world hunger. It just … happened.
My most‑viewed post ever is from October 11, 2006 ... part of a series called Hard Sayings, on “Sell all your possessions.” It has over 54,000 views. My second most‑viewed post is The History of the Choir from July 5, 2006, with more than 40,000 views. I don’t know who’s out there desperately searching for choir history, but apparently there are tens of thousands of them. My third‑place post limps in at around 14,000 views, clearly not trying hard enough.
What I do know is that I’ve probably gotten more out of writing this blog than anyone has gotten out of reading it. Teaching works the same way ... people say they enjoy it, but I’m the one walking away thinking, “Wow, I learned something today. I hope no one noticed.” Writing has traced my thinking, exposed my errors, reinforced better ideas, and trained me to walk through life wondering, “Should I write about that next?” It’s basically turned my brain into a 24/7 content generator, whether I like it or not.
And then there’s News Weakly. Somehow, those entries are consistently the most‑read posts each week. I’m not sure what that says about me, my readers, or society in general. Maybe I’m better at snark than I should be. I joke that “sarcasm is one of the services I provide,” but honestly, I wish it weren’t. It’s one of my many character flaws ... right up there with boldly suggesting "better ideas" to my wife or thinking I can fix things around the house without Googling it first.
So I keep writing. I keep trying to inform, teach, and explain ... sometimes successfully, sometimes accidentally, sometimes with more sarcasm than sanctification. And I’ll keep praying that God invests some of Himself into each and every reader, and that you’ll be blessed … one way or another.
Twenty years in, I’m grateful ... for the words, for the readers, for the strange statistics, for the accidental choir historians, and for the God who somehow uses all of it, even the snark.
Many of us are blessed to wrestle with these ideas, especially in a culture seemingly cursed with not caring about them at all. Thank you for keeping at it and keeping us thinking.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on 20 years. I've enjoyed your writing as well as being challenged by it. My Saturdays are not complete without you news round ups.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to you, Stan. Twenty years of daily posts is a very admirable achievement. Glad to learn you plan to continue; this must indicate you still have ideas to explore, and that is definitely a good thing. (Sorry to learn your high production might be attributable to sleep deprivation, but perhaps that counts as your very own “starving artist” experience. :)
ReplyDeleteYou show a gap in posts for July 9-20, 2020, for when you temporarily moved from Blogger to another platform. Was there no way to transfer those posts back to Blogger? Or are they, sadly, gone forever? (It’s sad for me personally because I submitted my very first tentative comments to your new site, and I would love to see again now what you said that dispelled my timidity back then!)
You mentioned number of views of a particular post. How can that be ascertained? When I open Winging It’s home page on my computer, I see the current post, of course, but then I can scroll down and see weeks of recent ones before it as well. How do you know which post is actually being viewed in that case, when multiple ones are visible when scrolling? If reading on a cell phone, one must click on a post snippet to open the full post but not so if accessing the web version.
As an aside, speaking of Blogger: Blogger did something to itself last week that is quite annoying--changing the Comments page of your posts to a very thin, light font that is almost impossible for me to read. I hope they put that back how it was and soon! (It is occurring at other Blogger sites, too, so it is not just you or something on my end.)
I'm sorry I don't respond enough. I usually feel like I don't have anything to contribute. You know ... swift to hear; slow to speak.
DeleteI have no way to transfer blogs from one blog to another and they're gone. Sorry.
As for statistics, as owner of the blog, I have access to statistics that you don't. An entire "statistics" tab. It includes how many have read any particular post, how many comments have been made ... all that ... for all time.
By the way, when I click on "REPLY" or whatever it is to make a comment, I get a nice BIG view of comments. Much easier to read. Even if I don't make a comment.
DeleteSomething is screwy; I'm getting the opposite result from you. If I scroll to the bottom of your post and click on “5 comments,” it switches to a new view, headed Comments on Twenty Years of Winging It : Winging It. The commenters’ names are legible, but the text of the comments is pale and hard to read. Every Blogger site I visit is doing the exact same thing, beginning last week. Fortunately, I compose my comments in Word and then copy & paste into your comment section (rather than compose them there), and I can read follow-up comments in my Outlook mail Inbox, but this change sure is hard on these old eyes of mine.
DeleteSpeaking of, I’ve been curious: Has that vision issue you told us about improved at all? Hope so!
I click on "Post a Comment" and get a screen with large print. It's a good thing, since it's easier on my eyes which have not improved.
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