History of maynardlifeoutdoors.com

 www.maynardlifeoutdoors.com actually a blog, not a website, was started January 2010 as a place to post the columns I was writing for the Beacon-Villager, the weekly newspaper put out by Gatehouse Media for the towns of Maynard and Stow.  The paper ceased publication in May 2022. After letting this lie fallow for months, I decided to resume posting new and recycled content on a not quite weekly basis.

As of January 2024, there have been roughly 500 postings, 30-40 per year. Cumulatively, the postings have accrued 919,000 views. The total should top one million in a couple of years. The chart provided by the blog server shows a gradual increase from 2010 until reaching a plateau of 5,000-10,000 per month from 2015 onward. The top four:

Luna Moth: Photos, Symbolism and a Poem (May 28, 2013; 106,000 views)

Calories in Human Blood (September 15, 2010; 40,300 views)

Wild Cucumber - Annoying Native Plant (August 20, 2013; 21,900 views)

Recovery from Donating Blood (March 5, 2011; 10,500 views)

All the others are in the broad range of under 100 views to low thousands.

Thus, hundreds of thousands of views, yet fewer than 300 comments over all that time. The golden era of blogging - posting and following - was in the early 2000's, when popular bloggers would have thousands of followers and many had monetized their blog on Blogger - a free service owned by Google - by allowing advertising to appear on their blog. From the beginning, I doubted I could ever have that sort of following - no going 'viral' - and so chose not to monetize. I figured a non-cluttered site would promote repeat visitors. My expectations held true. As of 2024, I have 24 people who signed on to see my blog whenever they logged on and I had posted something new. I guess that all the other visitors are people who stumbled across my site from having it turn up from an internet search on a topic. 

Long-since the golden era of blogging, "going viral" applies to Facebook (already fading), YouTube, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and TikTok. People aspire to millions of views. 'Influencer' has become a status to achieve, and for a few, a profession. 

MAYNARD MASSACUSETTS: A Brief History
was written for Maynard's 150 anniversary (2021)

The majority of my 500+ postings (that includes ~50 column repeats) have to do with Maynard's history. Many were collected into three books which are described in the About Me content at the top of the blog. There is also a chronological listing of columns separated by topic: History, Nature Observations, Recreational Opportunities, and Health.  

this is a work in progress