Near as I can tell, this is the one thousandth post on this blog. That means it’s time for a look backwards and a look to the future.

Looking back

Back on 22 February, 2005, this blog made its first appearance. I originally called it “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog.” In the winter of 2005, the Unitarian Universalist blogosphere had expanded to some forty-six blogs. Forty-six! I thought that was way too many Unitarian Universalist blogs, so my original title was meant to imply something cynical like “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog, As If the World Needs Another One.” There was also just the faintest echo of geek jargon. (If you’re curious, you can see those 46 blogs on Philocrites’s “Guide to UU Blogs” as updated on February 14, 2005, from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine: Link.)

Beginnings: In the beginning, this blog was merely an experiment. I was at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois (UUSG), as a one-year interim associate minister, and we were trying to come up with new avenues of communication for that church. Just for fun, I set up a blog on my AOL account, to see if a blog might provide another useful avenue of communication. I didn’t announce the blog’s existence to the congregation, yet within days, members of the congregation found the blog, wrote comments on it, and told me that they liked reading it. Suddenly, it wasn’t an experiment any more. I found myself writing a church blog for people I knew, members and friends of UUSG.

A second-tier UU blog: When I moved to New Bedford, Mass., in August, 2005, to serve the First Unitarian Church here, I discovered that very few people from my new church read my blog. I began writing for a mainstream UU readership. I moved to my own domain name in October, 2005, and within a year my readership grew significantly, from 600 unique visitors a month, to over 2,500 unique visitors a month. For a short period of time, “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist” was a moderately influential blog in the UU blogosphere — not a first-tier blog, but definitely in the second tier. My readership peaked in May, 2007, at 3,600 unique visitors; my Technorati rating peaked at about the same time.

An online notebook: While my readership was peaking, I found my interests changing. Last srping, I stopped trying to be a mainstream UU blog, and began to write more for myself. Now I use this blog as a notebook where I can think through ideas in public. Last April, I started videoblogging, and even though very few readers actually watch the videoblog entries (typically, a videoblog entry gets about 50 views), I still do it because videoblogging is fun for me. With these changes in emphasis, my readership dropped dramatically, to about 2,800 unique visitors a month as of September. However, the number of comments has increased, and best of all some people from my own church here in New Bedford have begun reading the blog regularly. I feel much more connected to my readership once again.

Looking to the future

A few new directions for this blog may emerge over the next few months.

Right now, I’m in the process of outlining a major writing project. Back when I was nineteen, I left college and spent a year working in a lumberyard. Recently, for no apparent reason, memories of that year began flooding back, and after writing pages of notes on those memories I began to realize that I was looking at a book’s worth of spiritual autobiography. I don’t particularly want to write a book at this point in my life, so instead I may simply post some of that material here.

Another big writing project seems to be bubbling up as well. I’m idly working on writing out a coherent system for religious education in liberal churches. At the moment, this project seems to want to follow the format used in Christopher Alexander’s book on architecture, A Pattern Language. Maybe I’ll be writing a “pattern language” for religious education? We’ll see what comes of this.

You may see more and more of two these two big writing projects here on this blog. But I can guarantee that some of the old, familiar features will continue as well. I’ll still write long, nerdy posts about birds and other local critters. My irrepressible alter ego, Mr. Crankypants, will no doubt make periodic appearances. I’ll keep on videoblogging, just for the sheer fun of it. After all, this blog is my hobby, and it’s supposed to be fun!

As always, let me know what you think.