Soon, 2015 will be a thing of the past. But before I let it slide away and embrace 2016, I want to highlight a few memorable game changers, that will undoubtedly shape the new year:
- The launch of Wooly Ventures
- This started as a tiny germ of an idea back in the summer, and is now sprouting into the beginning of something great. True, I still only have three subscribers, but I’ve come a long way since first starting my original website at woolyventures.wordpress.com. It took a few iterations before even getting to that point (i.e. Olives and Alpacas, SuKnits and one or two crashed and failed websites). The more I discover and learn about the thriving online knitting community, the more I want to be a part of it.
- Buying my plane ticket to New Zealand
- I knew that if I never bought my plane ticket, No. 3 (a.k.a quitting my job) would never turn into a reality. New Zealand sounded like a perfect place to start my year long journey. It’s one of the largest wool producers in the world, as well as being a top notch destination for backpacking and other outdoors activities.
- Quitting my job
- After almost two full years of working at a great engineering firm where I met many amazing people, it was tough to say goodbye. Nevertheless, this was an essential part of setting the tone for 2016.
Of course, no one can predict the future, but today, while searching the internet for website design tutorials, I came across Google Trends. It makes it possible to search for any search terms and see their popularity over time. For example, ‘knitting’ produced:
How cool is that? I mean, not only does it show that there are less and less people searching ‘knitting’ since 2005, but it also shows that the country where there are the most people searching for ‘knitting’ is in Iceland, followed closely by New Zealand.
I also learned the following.
Here is a bit of background information. I initially bought the domain of www.woolyventures.com without even thinking that there was another legitimate way to spell wooly (with two ‘l’s). This resulted in a bit of panic when I spotted the spelling of ‘woolly’ in one of my favorite knitting magazines and thought that perhaps ‘wooly’ was spelled incorrectly. Although judging from this Google Trends data, the spelling of ‘wooly’ with only one ‘l’ appears to be much more popular. And what’s with that spike in late 2015? I wouldn’t be surprised if to find out it was caused by my own use of Google Search …
Happy 2016 everyone!
