mattwie.be archives

When you’re trying to game yourself into posting more often, it makes sense to recycle some of your old material in an effort to gain momentum. I saw many of my old posts[ref]This post will be my 419^th so far[/ref] for the first time in a long while as I checked them against the new design, and I thought it’d be fun to share a few of them.

Since this blog has been effectively dead for the past 1.5 years, I thought that it might be good to draw your attention to things I’ve written here over the years. I could make a list of my favourite writings, but I frankly forget what I’ve written here. I instead used data from Google Analytics to name my top 5 posts over the history of this blog. They are:

1. On Valedictions – This has been on Google’s first page for the term “valedictions” for a long time now and consistently gets the most traffic. It also happens to be one of my best bits of writing—it marked the time when I first started to understand the difference between writing and writing.
2. A Modern Day Parable –I guess there’s a lot of pastors looking for sermon illustrations. This contemporary spin on the Parable of the Good Samaritan still gets to me.
3. Demotivational – This one’s just silly. I had a period where Google Images ranked me highly for that term. Demotivational posters are still funny.
4. Blogging: A Reliable Academic Source? – I was in University and grappling with how to possibly cite blogs as an academic source. Here I simply ask for feedback on the topic, and receive some. I collected some follow-up thoughts in a redux post.
5. Go the Second Mile – This familiar turn of phrase comes out of the Sermon on the Mount has layers you don’t know are there until illuminated by a pacifist like Walter Wink. Reading this made Christian nonviolence the only feasible option for me.

And, to give lie to the number in the title, here’s four more posts that are interesting for other reasons:

• Brian McLaren, Conversation and Life (most commented) – Your classic case of a secondary statement turning into an all-out comment assault.
• Sign of the Apocalypse (amusing) – In which I begin a series of posts pointing to our impending doom.
• The Violent Fantastic Imagination (personal favourite) – In which I connect two things I’m passionate about: fantasy books and nonviolence.
• Rebellion as Staying Put – My only post to almost get published in expanded form, twice: once in a magazine, once in a book.[ref]Looking back, the disappointment from this contributed to my writing hiatus. I was cut from the magazine without ever being told until I opened my author’s copy only to discover I wasn’t in it. The book project fell apart due to the publisher slowly disintegrating.[/ref]

It’s encouraging to see how much I’ve written over the past 5 years. Now, to keep that momentum going.