My posts have been...including more reviews of fancy travel hacked flights, tours and slow travel locations. Possibly as a result of this shift in topic – or possibly simply because blogging seems to be on its way out according to a few of my blogging peers – my comments section has been quieter lately. I talked about this in one of my monthly recaps with the spin that I didn’t realize I had come to rely on getting at least one comment per post to know that people (and not just bots 🙂 ) were reading my words and they weren’t floating into an abyss.

I didn’t want to be reliant on external validation when I had written this blog without it being public for years, and hadn’t realized I had come to rely on anything but the joy I get from writing it. So I was trying to grow after realizing that not receiving comments on multiple posts in a row bothered me for some reason. I’m going to do my best to not rely on that kind of feedback going forward and will continue to blog for the main reason I always have: for myself 🙂 .

I also followed a reader suggestion to add a “Like” button at the bottom of my posts (it’s after the “Share This” section and before the “Related” articles section) because readers said they don’t necessarily have something they want to comment, but that a Like button would help show there is still a human reading. All fair 🙂 .

🙋‍♂️ there's still a human reading your posts on this end 🙂

Also, today I learned there's a Guineafowl Pufferfish.