I knew that choosing to do a blog post with an image to go with it, one each day for 2021 would have an effect on me.

It's been both energizing and a drain. But the upside is I'm getting faster at posting. I'm also seeing the posts I do here different and more clearly.

This blog is me expressing and serving and it's my lab to develop and experiment. I know that as a result choosing to have:

• multiple topics: UX advocacy, experiments and things I'm learning, occasionally focused teaching, project updates,
• different levels of refinement among posts
• included in that mix of posts, personal perspective about me and even mentioning family

This sort of strategy is not what I see recommeded most often.

What I see in the analytics, the quirkiness of forms and topics isn't a problem. Which I'm super thankful for that. It's encouraging and I appreciate that folks are getting something from this lab.

To be thoughtful about the analytics topic, I'm hosting at Squarespace and since they're the servers and platform rendering the pages they know when requests happen. They also have a heuristic for "visits" and "unique visitors" which last I checked is something each analytics platform defines for itself.

For some of my projects I'm starting to not use Google or other analytics platforms. If I don't have a direct obvious need then I think it's worth noting that and not adding it just because or out of habit.

I'm working to teach inclusivity and thoughtful design, that's one small way to walk the talk.

Posts and products come out of this experiment to be shared in other places. In a way you're visiting my studio by visiting the blog. If I were making music, you're hearing the practice sessions and demo recordings. Some of those are developed enough to go places to become new forms and stages of experiments.

• Some articles I republish as metered content on Medium.
• Other articles I plan to share at my Hackaday blog.
• And similar I intend to share some at my new Dev.To blog.

Without using this space frequently I was getting fairly stuck creatively. I was writing nearly daily but not making use of the words. After a few years of those words piling up, it felt like its own negative creative stress. So thank you for being here in this lab/studio.

Enough about me, what about you? Do you have a place to practice and is it completely private or do you like to practice in public too?