Is this thing on?

Photo: Explodingdog.com

I was having a discussion about blogging last night, and referenced a discussion I had about blogging back in October. It was enlightening because sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself and your blog is to solicit some honest advice from folks that know you and read your blog. They know who you are as a person and can put "2 + 2" together for you.

One of the things that has "bothered" me lately is that my blog stats are what they have always been, but a lot of traffic now comes from "Google Image" searches. I have somehow made my blog the top sight for certain Catholic pictures. This makes a lot of folks come to my blog, solely for the pics, which is fine I guess, since they aren't mine and they probably wouldn't be here anyways... but I digress.

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where have all the flowers gone...

Anyways, it got me thinking about what I blog about and more importantly why I blog. When I took my hiatus during the fall, and a bit this winter, I definitely lost track of why I started this blog. I became worried about just sustaining a readership, and tried to find a way to keep readers by posting things that I thought people might want to read, but really didn't offer a lot of my own thoughts on things. I was more of a re-post blog, and yet I spent a ton of time doing it. The worst part though is that I lost readers, well maybe not lost them, but at least bored them into nothingness. 

I never cared about how many people were reading my blog - well that is not true, every blogger cares somewhat that people are reading their blog, but it wasn't about popularity and numbers. Or was it? See that is the struggle one wages with their blog. It is a battle between people reading you, agreeing with you, and validating your opinions against self improvement, spiritual development, and deepening your relationship with God; sometimes the two are compatible and sometimes they aren't.

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it's what I do

Discussing who I am as a blogger made helped me to discover two traits that I think served me well early on both in my public blog goals and my personal ones. I think that the key to my blogging early on was that I posted with Intensity and Honesty. I think that where I lost folks is when I would do one but not the other. I figured that one could exist without the other, and I was wrong. I know this because over time folks stopped reading, or should I more properly say it: stopped caring. I know this because my comment boxes have gone silent. 

Hopefully these realizations will help me reclaim what I once had - intensity and honesty.

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