One year ago

It has been precisely one year since I started dumping my thoughts upon this blog. The world has already started to change under the influence of the SARS-Cov-2, but we were all hoping that things would progress much faster back then. I was also still working on my PhD thesis, but that has been gone for a while already: studying the COVID pandemic during the COVID pandemic is a job that is only suited for a well-seasoned epidemiologist or statistician, and I was neither of them. Even my professor was "just" an expert on computer networks, which share some similarities with the way the virus spreads, but that is where his knowledge might be extrapolated to my work.

Over the course of the last 365 days I have managed to post 256 entries, which I can only regard with some level of satisfaction: with the only exception of the one week when I was away from home on vacation with some friends, I have managed to put together five articles per week every week. I have to admit that not everyone of them is equally deserving of your attention. Some of them were admittedly clumsier, more convoluted, occasionally just a flat out rant, but even so I am happy that I took the time and mad the effort of sitting down, incubate the idea, research about it whenever it was necessary and finally composed a text to be posted.

Photo: Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0)

People with a limited knowledge in informatics might have overseen that fact, but for us computer scientists the number 256 is full of wonderful resonances: it happens to be 2 to the power of 8, which means that it is the number of possible values that a byte can take (eight bits, with each one being a 0 or a 1 means exactly 256 combinations). As a matter of facts, most digital images are composed of combinations of numbers between 0 and 255 for each of the three colors red, green and blue: having 255, 0 and 0 will give you a bright red, whereas 128, 128, 128 means a middle brightness gray. In the case of the blog the number 256 is just accidental, because it just represents 51 full weeks of posts plus the initial one on a Sunday, but it is still a nice number to have.

For the most part of this year I have had essentially no readers. Considering the nature of these writing I explicitly decided not to advertise this blog among my acquaintances, so it was not surprising that nobody read it. Later on I decided that it might be worth linking to certain articles that came out particularly well, even if many others remained the most absolute obscurity. It is clear that, once you start to see traffic in your website, the chances that visitors stray into regions other than the ones advertised start to increase. It turns out that one post per week on Facebook linking only to one of the articles has already netted me a significant increase in number of visits. It has also lead to some discussion, online or in person, about the topics that I introduced.

The other source of readers has been the photo hosting websites. Flickr.com in particular allows to comment on the photos it hosts, so I have started to explicitly mention when and where a photograph was used, so that the authors did have a chance to see their work properly cited. Chances are that most of the photographers will not align with my ideas and might never again come back to my blog, but citing them and linking to the blog needs to be done anyway, so I consider it time well spent.

This will probably not be the best entry of the week, but I could not let the occasion pass to celebrate my own persistence. In a time where the workload has been flaky and dragging myself out of bed every morning was not necessary many days, this blog has given me a reason to fire up my laptop, give it some thought and spend a bit of time putting words together. Even if no one else has drawn any benefit out of it, I certainly have. Let us see what the rest of the year brings on, but I will try to keep up with the writing as much as I can, because I definitely enjoy it. Have a nice week.