Online for one year!

Exercise successful. When I put this site online, I agreed with myself that I wanted to go ahead with it for at least a year. That was exactly a year ago, so that goal has been achieved. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop now; on the contrary. So now is the time for a look ahead, and especially for retrospectives and lists, because that's what you do at the turn of a year.

One year online!

Grand plans
When I first welcomed you to my site in August 2019, I had grand plans. Most of it turned out quite well, although I recently decided to temporarily slow down a bit. As you may have seen in recent weeks, it really was temporary, because I am going full speed again, which of course is partly due to my vacation. That 'full speed' naturally is relative, but one piece a week is actually quite a lot for a hobby project like this website. I easily spend more than a day preparing and making every piece, especially the ones about cars, which include more images. And then there's of course the translations – which I enjoy doing and which I learn a lot from – because since February every page has also been available completely in English. And that brings me to the lists.

Dutch vs. English
When translating from Dutch, I noticed several times that the English language often needs fewer words to say the same thing. However, that's not what the figures show: all Dutch pages of this site together amount to approximately 47,500 words, while I needed around 50,600 words in English. Now this can still be explained by the fact that with my poems on the pages in English I first show the Dutch original and then make an attempt to translate them underneath. That therefore results in a not entirely fair comparison. So I decided to look purely at the texts in the categories cars, linguistics and visual arts as well, so only everything from the introduction to the last paragraph, without the captions under images. To my surprise I come to 38,528 words in Dutch and 40,350 in English... So even than, there still are more words in English. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that in English I have to explain more, such as typically Dutch things the Dutch-speaking reader knows without explanation. Or my feeling that English needs fewer words than Dutch is simply not correct, that's of course also possible.


Figures and look ahead
How about some more numbers? In total, not counting this piece, I put 157 web pages online in the past year. Those pages together contain 238 images and 66 different articles. I used slightly less images for the 86 posts that I put on Instagram: 218. There were fewer pictures on Instagram, because for example the 'banners' at the top of every page or the icons in the menu are only on my website, of course. On Instagram, the images in which I compare different cars are the most popular, which is clear from the best nine, which I show on my Instagram account. Both there and on Twitter (only in Dutch) and via RSS I will, also in the near future, let you know which new articles I have posted. For some time, I will continue with two pieces each month in the section West Germanic and a poem in Poetry on day three. Due to the many labor-intensive images I am reducing the number of cars I add to My Classics to one a month, but on the other hand I plan to write about visual art with greater regularity, like I did a little over a week ago about Mondrian. And who knows what else the next year will bring... We'll see!