Today is the 19th Anniversary of the beginning of the Never Yet Melted blog.

I’ve done 17,902 posts before this one and had millions of readers in countries all over the world. The exact count has been lost because NYM has outlived all the original statcounters.

At its peak, I had 30-50 thousand readers a month.

My blogging efforts have declined in response to the decline of blog significance. Competition from social media, like X, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Substack, has taken away much of our former traffic.

Also, I am increasingly fed up with the WordPress nerds’ feckless updates which wipe out foreign accents and special characters (like apostrophes, quotation marks, and M and N dashes, substituting gobbledy-gook and which change image link formats thereby making all older postings imageless.

Google and some other ads used to cover partially my server costs, but the other ad sources died and Google gave me an ultimatum about removing the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons, so I told Google “Gotz von Berlichingen!“.

In fact, I have decided to switch over to Substack myself. I’m thinking of writing one or two original essays a week myself and giving up daily blog posts.

Look for an announcement of my first Substack post very soon, and do subscribe.

Thanks to everyone for your past support,

David