The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Here's some history about this blog. Caution: this story is of a boring nature, and may induce a permanent coma.

2010 - The birth of a shitty blog

In October 2010, I felt the urge to write about topics in a clear, simple way. I thought this would help me to understand them.

I heard that Blogspot was a good option to create blogs for free. So I filled in some info, and wham, bam, this blog was born. I called it "Let's Be Clear", and the URL was letsbeclear.blogspot.com.

My first ever post was "History of video games consoles".

2013 - Domain change to paulchrisjones.blogspot.com

Around the beginning of 2013, I changed this blog's URL to paulchrisjones.blogspot.com, because I didn't just want to write "let's be clear" posts anymore. I wanted to write about other topics.

Here's what my blog now looked like:

Unfortunately, the domain change caused my monthly visits to plummet from 9,000 visits a month to almost zero, as shown by the graph below. If the graph were a roller-coaster, it'd be the world's deadliest.

The reason was that people were still going to letsbeclear.blogpost.com instead of paulchrisjones.blogpost.com.

But why was I getting 9,000 monthly visits in the first place? Was my blog really so interesting that 9,000 people visited it every month? The answer is no, my blog was not that interesting. In fact, it was pretty shit. The only reason I was getting so my views was that some of my blog's images were at the top of the Google Images results page. For example, if you'd searched for "quadratic formula" in Google Images, one of the top results would be this image from my blog:

Once I'd changed the domain to paulchrisjones.blogpost.com, my blog no longer hosted these popular images so the monthly view count fell to almost zero.

2014 - Shit gets serious

In December 2013, I decided to get more professional. I got a proper domain name, paulchrisjones.com, and I also bought hosting with Bluehost, for around $100 a year. And I installed Wordpress.

2015 - A third domain name change

In May 2015, I changed the domain again (so a third domain change) to pauljonesblog.com. Moving my blog to a new domain was a lot more difficult than it sounds. Also, people were confused and still went to paulchrisjones.com. My visitor numbers weren't affected though, because I automatically redirected them from my old URL to my new one.

The situation in 2016

Someone is using my old domain, letsbeclear.blogspot.com, for their own blog. It's a strange feeling. It feels like someone is living in my former house and they have their feet on my coffee table.

I still own paulchrisjones.blogspot.com but I've set the posts to private so no-one can see them except me. There's no sense in having the same posts published in two places.

I have my greedy eye on pauljones.com, which is currently taken by a guy in New Jersey.

Finally, here's a chart showing my visitor data so far:

The blog still hasn't regained the popularity it had during its glory days of late 2012, but it's building momentum.