A year of blogging

It's been just over a year since Alan Cann finally persuaded me to start a blog (I was worried I didn't have anything to say). My first post was on 3 April 2009 on Developing online tutorials at Teaching and Assessment Network. It was a slow start but in the last few months I've been beginning to find blogging really useful. If you look at the archives for this blog you'll see that they extend back to January 2009 - that's because I tried to start with a team blog for Student Development, but it didn't work - but I've imported my posts from then for completeness.

Alan (him again) put it very well last week in a post of his last week re his thoughts on blogging.

To be perfectly honest with you, the main reason I write this blog is so that I can find things again. Now, I have lots of ways of finding things, such as Google, social search and all the tags on my delicious account, but they don't help very much when you can't remember what you're looking for. Writing about things lodges them in my brain so that's less likely to happen. It also changes what I decide I need to know. Along the way, I've found that some of the stuff I write is of interest to other people. Which is nice.

I don't look at the stats for the blog very often but I guess I should make it at least an annual event, so here are the top posts of all time on my blog (cue relevant music).

The Remembering the milk post is largely because James Clay retweeted it at ALTC2009 (thanks James!). I'm pleased to see one of the Tagginganna posts up there, Advice from Helpdesk Hollie, and of course (who could forget) the-practically-went-viral Brown cake.