Abandon Blog
I fancied a change from regular stuff today, so I decided to post a book review to my other site: Bookstuff. This was space that I got for free from Wordpress.com when I signed up with them (very useful if you don’t want the hassle of finding a domain and maintaining it yourself) and it has been very neglected indeed. I last posted there a year ago.
And it got me wondering. When Wordpress lists the number of blogs it hosts, they list the “live” blogs – blogs that still exist and haven’t been deleted. But how many of them actually exist in the sense that they are regularly written to? If you search the web for titles of books I’ve written about, I doubt the site will be high on the list, but it will be there. How many of the sites have been all but abandoned?
When I started blogging I thought it would be easy. How hard can it be to write about whatever I want to and post to something that’s already templated? Far easier than a normal website. Right? However, I quickly found that a lot of what I think about doesn’t translate well to the “page”. And if I think it’s not worth writing about, why the hell should I expect someone to read it?
For example, today it’s snowing. Via some stroke of sheer good luck, the weather office predicted it correctly. I know, I’m sure they’re as flabbergasted as I am. However, it’s not worth a full post. It’s pretty light, it doesn’t inconvenience me and it doesn’t present a threat to life and limb. I have a husky, so he loves it. But it hasn’t settled enough to even make the back yard look pretty. And no one would care. Compare that to Corey’s post on snow and you’ll see what I mean. And, by the way, this isn’t a case of snow envy.
All this pretty much means that there would be nothing to post about today. This is a real problem for a self confessed random blogger, if even the weather conspires to not spoil my Sunday I have nothing to tell anyone. My PC works, so no need to post a cool fix I found. My family is well and healthy, so nothing personal to write about. And I’m no more furious than normal about the government. Charlton Heston died, but it doesn’t really affect me.
Which brings me back round to my point. Friends of mine blog, so there is a certain amount of “not being the first to break” involved. I do write an awful lot of filler stuff in an attempt to blog at least once a week, but as this isn’t supposed to be high literature or a daily newspaper, no one particularly cares. So I wonder how many blogs just die out because no one can muster up the energy or the time to write about it? This being the internet, nothing ever really disappears even if the site is taken down, so however much or little you write is there forever.
I would say that it could be a good thing to only count sites that have updates within a 6 month period, but it’s possible that a site is designed only for annual updates and they shouldn’t be unfairly excluded. Ah well, no easy answers, but there are two things I’m glad about: I squeezed another post out about nothing and I’m not a splogger.
