We’ve reached a milestone on this blog. What you are reading right now is blog #100!
The journey has been long and challenging. I never started writing to get to this number, but here we are anyway. I’ve written earlier in detail about the route this blog has taken. There are two parts, so I suggest you read them after this blog – I’ll link them down at the end as well.
To summarize, it started off as a place to capture memories from college, then I started writing about college trips and enjoyed that more. After college, it became a place to capture thought trails during my travels. Then it became a “proper travel blog” with full itineraries and immersive travel blogs – aimed at making you feel as if you’re travelling with us. I also started exploring other areas of my life in my blogs – so ultimately, this website has become a Pensieve of the memories that I would love to access later in life.
The big question which keeps popping up is – what next? To put it in the words of my 2-year old son, “Where we are going now?” – a question he came up with when we were travelling to attend multiple wedding functions across Karnataka and Kerala in a span of 2 weeks.
One thing is certain – the travel blogs will continue to come in. I absolutely love recounting the entire trip in detail and believe that it captures the emotions way better than photos. I know that most people don’t prefer to read in so much detail, but this is something I will continue to do for myself and my family. Up next is a series about my very first trip to Europe where we will cover some popular destinations.
Another thing I’ve been working on is to make the website’s flow better and more discoverable. Staying true to my last blog on upskilling as a way to achieve frugality, I’ve learnt a bunch of SEO (Search Engine Optimization = techniques to make your website appear on Google Search) and optimized all 99 other pages for keywords, title, meta description, alt text for images and all that jazz. It seems to be working as the organic search traffic to this site has almost doubled in the last month and continues to go strong. The Kazakhstan series is getting the most number of hits followed by Uzbekistan and then Austria. I’ll keep experimenting to make the overall website better and better.
There are two other topics that I’m really passionate about which I will delve into at some point in future.
One is my parenting journey as a working dad. I’ve struggled to find enough material about this as most “parenting” websites are written from a mother’s POV. I did manage to find a couple of books based on which I’ve implemented things over the last 3 years. I’d love to create a repository of my learnings. Hopefully, it becomes a bunch of content that gives dads more confidence in their parenting journey. It would be fun for my son to read them (I hope) when he is a grown-up!
The second one is balanced leadership. There’s a lot of stuff out there talking about leadership but it is mostly from a POV of climbing the corporate ladder. My take on leadership is that it is a mindset that reflects across all aspects of life – you don’t always need to be the person rallying from the front. The focus would be on how to strike a balance and grow in all aspects of life. I have been doing annual goal-setting and reviews for every part of my life for the last 4 years – I will be sharing my learnings from there as well.
I have no idea how all of this will fit seamlessly into this website. I guess I’ll figure that out on the go – I have a couple of ideas in mind which I will experiment with.
That’s about it. This blog was mainly to break out of the mental block – “oh no, what do I write for the 100th one? Aaaargh!”. I’m super grateful for each and every one of you who has been there on this journey with me – reading, commenting and supporting at every step. Thank you!
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