My Six (6) Year Anniversary as a Writer at HubPages

A few days ago,on the 9th of October 2015, I was checking my emails when I came across this one from HubPages:

"Hi Jodah,

You have hit a pretty impressive milestone—your 6 Year Anniversary on HubPages! Holy cow, you're practically a HubPages expert! It's the long-time Hubbers like you that make this site a wonderful place to write. Happy Hubbiversary!

Fun fact: A common six year anniversary gift is candy, so today is your perfect excuse to splurge on sweets! If you decide to make your own celebratory candy, don’t forget to take lots of photos and turn your handiwork into a recipe Hub!"

I knew I had passed five years some time ago and had an inkling that six must be approaching, so this email confirmed it. Thank you Hub Pages Staff. Now, I had the problem of what to do. Do I just let it pass as another milestone with a new icon on my profile page to mark the occasion? Maybe I could throw a party to celebrate, but the only other people vaguely interested, or willing to come to a party, would be other hubbers and very few of them even live in Australia let alone the same state as me.

I have noticed some hubbers announce these occasions in the Forums but only a handful of my followers frequent them, so I decided against that. As I have previously written hubs to mark my 100th and 200th published hubs I decided that this is just as worthy an achievement, so I decided to commemorate it with a hub as well.

Welcome to my Six (6) Year Anniversary Hub. Did anyone bring the candy, or cake and candles?

When you first join HubPages, like many other sites, you are asked to choose a User Name. Deciding on a name as your online presence is sometimes easier said than done. From experience at other sites and for online security reasons it is usually a good idea not to use your real name. For this reason and because I had used it elsewhere before I became the hubber known as "Jodah." Did I hear someone ask, "That's pretty dull and boring, how did you come up with that?'

Well, a year or two before I joined HubPages my wife and I had been toying with setting up our own business. We hadn't settled exactly what the business would be other than it would possibly involve growing and selling organic produce, and home made craft items.

We played around with various names including our own and the one we finally agreed on was "Jodahkamah." This is actually a combination of element of both our names.

• John David Hansen
• Kathleen Mary Hansen

By taking the first two letters of each of our first and second names, and then the first letter of our surname, it became: JoDaKaMaH, and separately we could have the nicknames of: Jodah and Kamah.

That business didn't eventuate unfortunately, other than a couple of off-shoots that we have experimented with "Kamah's Kreations" (my wife's textile art business) and my "Coverty Creek Permaculture Design" (a field we both studied).

Anyway, from all that "Jodah" came into being.

The very first article I wrote here at HubPages under the user-name "Jodah" was a hub titled "In Search of Self-sufficiency." The advice I had read when joining the site said to write about what you know or have expertise and training in.

As I had recently completed a course for a "Certificate in Permaculture Design", and my wife and I had recently relocated to a rural property with the intention of living a lifestyle as self-sufficient as possible, I chose to write my first hub about that. I followed all the guidelines as best I could (almost al my own photos etc) and churned out a 1577 word article that I am still quite proud of today.

It still has a hub score of 81 (by the time I finished writing this it has risen to 83) even though it gets very few views nowadays (I know hub scores are not important..really I do). In the first two years after publishing this it received a total of four comments. At that stage I was not an active part of the HP community and didn't have any followers or vise versa.

The Pythagoreans acknowledged number 6 to be the first perfect number.

In mathematics a perfect number is when all the numbers divisors (excluding the number itself) are added, the sum equals the number itself. 1+2+3=6

In addition when including the number itself and dividing by two the result is the number itself. (1+2+3+6)/2 = 6

Perfect numbers are rare. The Ancient Greeks recognized four perfect numbers: 6 – 28 – 496 – 8,128.

Why didn't I write a hub celebrating five years here at HubPages you may well ask? What makes six years more special? Well, for no reason other than the number six has more special meaning for me. I do refer to it as my lucky number and if I am buying tickets in a competition or choosing numbers in a lottery, number six is on the top of my list. Even if I decide to have a punt on the horse races, I only look for: race 6, horse 6, barrier draw 6. That happens only occasionally, but I guarantee that when it does it has a good winning percentage (if the horse doesn't win there is a good chance it will finish 6th).

For a start I was born on the sixth, but not only that, my birth date is 6th May 1957. If you know anything about numerology you will know that to calculate your numerological number you take your full date of birth (in my case 05/06/1957), add all the numerals together eg. 5+6+1+9+5+7= 33, and then reduce it to the lowest common denominator: 3+3=6.

You may dispute this and say you should use the full year as a number eg. 1957+5+6. Ok, well let's do that and we get a total of: 1968. Once again add these: 1+9+6+8= 24. But then when we reduce this to the lowest common denominator, again we get: 2+4=6.

Do you see where I am coming from, and why I consider 'six' my lucky number? But wait it doesn't stop there!

Now let's look closer at my name: JOHN DAVID HANSEN

Numerologists also believe that another way you can work out "your" number from your full name and by the number of letters in it. Once again 4+5+6= 15: reduced 1+5=6.

That's enough evidence for me to decide to make Number 6 my lucky number, and a relevant reason to write a hub celebrating my sixth Anniversary here at HubPages.

"Liùhe" (六和), in the Mystical Numbers of Taoism, represents the number 6 and symbolizes the Six Harmonies:
體 合 於 心 (Body in harmony with Heart),
心 合 於 意 (Heart in harmony with Intent),
意 合 於 氣 (Intent in harmony with Qi),
氣 合 於 神 (Qi in harmony with Spirit),
神 合 於 動 (Spirit in harmony with Motion),
動 合 於 空 (Motion in harmony with Nothing).

1. Every Braille cell is made up of six dots; two columns consisting of three dots on each side. Various dots are raised to specify different letters.
2. In the Bible, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus preformed his first miracle in Cana. At a wedding six stone jars were filled with water. Jesus turned the water into wine.(John 2:6-9)
3. God took 6 days to create the world in the Book of Genesis; humankind was created on day 6. In the City of God, Augustine of Hippo suggested that God's creation of the world took six days because 6 is a perfect number (book 11, chapter 30)
4. In regard to musical instruments: a standard guitar has 6 strings.and most woodwind instruments have 6 basic holes or keys (e.g., bassoon, clarinet, saxophone etc)
5. Any one of us is only about 6 acquaintances away from anyone else in the world. (called "six degrees of separation")
6. The hardest tongue twister in English is said to be: "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick"

So what has changed since I joined Hub Pages? Looking back through my hubs I found that two and a half years ago I was searching for poetry hubs to read and I stumbled upon one by a very popular hubber named Nellieanna Hay. After leaving a comment on her hub, she kindly reciprocated by reading my hubs "Love and Other Muses" and "In Search of Self-sufficiency."

This was the turning point for me at HubPages because dear Nellieanna was impressed by my writing and subsequently introduced other hubbers in her circle to my articles. I was kindly accepted into this wonderful group who many of you belong to. This gave me a new incentive to write and I suddenly went from having written three articles in the first three years to writing 56 over the next 12 months.

So now, after six years, this will be my 226th article. There are many other hubbers who have written more articles in less time but because of my slow start I am more than happy with what I have achieved. I now have 585 followers (whereas I had none for the first three years). This is a case of give and take though. If you want genuine followers you need to follow others in return, and so I am following 501 people myself. I have even compiled a number of the poems I have written here into an eBook. Without HubPages I would never have done that.

In six years I have seen a lot of hubbers come and go. Some have just suddenly disappeared without any goodbyes or fanfares. Others have expressed their dissatisfaction with various changes at HubPages and made their displeasure and the fact that they were leaving loudly known in forums. I haven't agreed with all the changes here either but I know ultimately the decisions made are genuinely for the betterment of the site.

If I was to have left HubPages it would have been within my first three years here when I had no followers and seemed to be wasting my time. But I am still here and am not planning on taking my work anywhere else. I am now looking forward to the goal of ten years at HubPages, and as long as the site is still around then, so will I be (touch wood).