A whole year of blogging.

Well today is a special day. For me that is. Maybe other people, but mainly me. This blog has been going on for a whole year now. It started of as just some rambling about music on Facebook, in the form of Facebook Notes. I had already written a few notes and wanted to expand it a little bit so decided to revisit Blogger and make a new account. I had already used blogger for my now defunct Judas Disciple and Mind of the Buddha. My very first entry was my defence of Sepultura's Roorback. Mainly I had just concentrated on writing about music, because I really really like listening to music. I didn't really expect to reach a big audience, this has purely been for my own satisfaction. Well... sometimes it does feel good when you receive nice feedback, it was especially nice when Queensryche shared my blog about them and all of the sudden I had this massive surge of like-minded Queensryche fans. Which I had never seen before. As most people will have noticed (and quite a few have commented on) I do have the tendency to write about heavy metal music. But from time to time I have also written about something completely different like Baby Dee, Jon Lord and Bill Hicks. Often I try to write about rather obscure bands that, in my mind, deserve a lot more attention. Bands like Xanthochroid, Thy Catafalque, and Blaze Bayley.

Then one day I came across this stupid meme shard by 9Gag on Facebook. About how people who are bullied should stop whining, or some kind of stupid shit like that and it pissed me off and then I got an apology message from an unexpected source. So I decided to write about my experience of being bullied at school. It was one of the most shared blogs I had written up to that point and I felt like a load had been lifted off my shoulders, again. Then I returned to writing about music. Shortly after I received a message from Throwdown Syndicate asking me if I fancied writing about them, something completely new to me. So I did. Then I started getting itchy palms about writing something else. One day while cycling I started noticing how many cyclists weren't using helmets, the following day I counted how many cyclists and how many of them were using helmets. It pissed me off so much that I decided to hit Google Scholar and Quest, thanks to me being in a university I was able to read even more studies. This was the result. This was followed up with a, uhhh, follow up to my bullying blog talking about the social impact and the social price we all pay for bullying.

I had been an avid reader of the Skeptical Raptor and other science-y debunk sites and wanted to get in on the game. Then after a little while I wrote a blog about the Flu Vaccine, which in turn got changed to Student Nurse Perspective entries. Then Mr Skeptical Raptor asked if he could reblog it, which I would have been a fool to say no to. Since then I've written about IT in healthcare, importance of education, being male and GMO's. These have been the most satisfying to write because I always feel like I've learned something after I've written them, and this series has also been my most successful one in terms of views. If there is one thing I will miss when I qualify it's the University's journal database. Sure I can probably still read the books, but I won't be able to access the database.

I still write mostly about music. But on the whole this blog has become my platform to vent out. I still use it to develop my writing skills. And I still publish on a very regular sporadic basis. I've tried to make money out of, but I don't think I'll ever be able to make a living out of it. Currently my income from this blog stands at 55 pence. As it stands I have had 11123 pageviews, which in the grand scheme of things isn't much, but in my little bubble it is a fairly considerable amount. This is the third month in a row where I get more then 1000 views. Which is fairly considerable for considering that at one point I was struggling to get over 200.

Thanks to the blog I have also come across some wonderful people, some who I'd tentatively probably call friends. I have no idea if I've got some regular readers, if I do. Please leave a comment... or not if you don't want to.

But on the whole, thanks for reading.

Yours Truly,
Ingvar Arni Ingvarsson.