Thought Picnic: On the attraction of blogging

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Blog rehousing woes

Reflecting on my 16 years of blogging I dug into some analytics of my blogs, followers of the second incarnation of my blog for it first hosted on the blog-city.com domain from 2003 and I had to move each blog, brick by brick from mid-2010 to the Blogger platform, when this local blog hosting company decided they were having no more fun with blogging.

Blog - Brick by heavy brick

I had a transition period of about 18 months, until the domain closed in January 2012, it was a punch in the gut and left me with a terrible experience from altruistically supporting small businesses that provide services I might need.

The old blog hosting site did not have a migration or export facility I could use to move my blog and I could not allow the accumulated work of over 7 years to be lost. Though, I did lose readership, followership and statistics for the blog that was at the time registering about a million views a month.

Old bloggers just memories

The migration process was also imperfect, many of the blogs retain link references to locations that no more exist. I only get to review those links when informed or when I retrieve one from the archive that I check before sharing.

Now that the blog has been on the Blogger platform, I acquired a domain name in 2010 and ensured there was a bit of portability, just in case Google decides hosting blogs is no more fun. I hope not.

One aspect of the blog analytics that saddens me is the number of linked followers to my blog who are no more blogging again. I visited some that were extinct, the other apparently live ones had not been updated since somewhere between 2010 and 2012. Only two were actively posting something, whilst one endured to early 2016.

The live blogs also had links to other blogs I used to read from the mid-2000s, many now with dead links or in the state of hibernation for years. It made me wonder why people are blogging no more. Apart from those who blog for influence or business, the art of blogging for leisure, having stories, experiences or insights to share has been lost to other micro-blogging or less intensive unstructured forums.

Distractions and attractions

I can say that my engagements on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram might have affected my prolific blogging output, but it has not led to my abandoning blogging altogether. The other social media platforms have their purposes and they cannot entirely replace blogging.

I believe we need more blogging not less, more perspective to life, stories that we can relate to told in a unique voice, style, and fashion, all contributing to the amazing tapestry of our diverse humanity. People also ask how they can begin blogging, but never follow through, some think it is difficult to blog, but I beg to differ.

A blog written on the fundamental basis of where you are, what you see, how it affects you and what you might have learnt, is already four paragraphs of information that can turn the mundane into the very interesting, that is a great attraction, the simplicity of writing a story.

Just a few things to note, a spelling checker is necessary, a grammar checker can be useful, always acknowledge and attribute anything that is not your original thought, it does not take away from your perspective, and give it your best shot.

I sometimes read some of my old blogs and wonder if I wrote them and what might have possessed my fingers as they typed out the musings bordering on the insane. Some are funny and others just strange. I still derive much pleasure from blogging, though the promise to do more never really happens.