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Monday, July 28, 2014

Blogging from the heart

I started a blog post last week on the topic of knowing (i.e. the more people know about something, the less they will like it). And the more I wrote, the less I liked it. Because it didn't have heart. I was writing in a formulaic way without really caring. I was posting just to be posting and creating a "next blog" worthy post. So I deleted it.

This is one reason I don't post every day (other than having a life). It is too easy to fall into the trap of cranking things out just to be cranking them out. I might as well be working. Because if you don't really care about what you are writing, neither will the reader.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

The Next Blog Zone


Call me the eternal optimist, but I thought I'd click on blogger's "next blog" button and find something entertaining and once again all I could find were an endless series of blogs that hadn't been updated since 2010. And most of them began with either an apology for not posting for awhile or a resolution that they were going to commit to posting at least once a week. What added insult to injury to all of this was that some of the dead blogs had hundreds of followers. I have 27 and I've been posting for ten years consistently.

The only up-to-date blog I found seemed to be an ongoing essay on archetypes that held me riveted for at least a paragraph.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Death of a friend


In August, it would have been 17 years since I adopted my cat Bailey. I first met her in a small pet shop in a strip mall in Shoreline. The local PAWs occasionally would put kittens in the store for adoption. She was this tiny spec of a kitten. They had named her Beta. I changed it to Bailey because she actually seemed to be more of a dark chocolate color than black and reminded me of Bailey's Irish Creme.

I had an older cat at the time named Cuervo. He was an orange tabby who I'd also adopted from PAWs. He took to Bailey quickly and they played together.

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Immortal posts



All of the blog experts say that you need to post on a fairly regular basis to boost your blog traffic. I have not found this to be particularly true. My blog traffic stays pretty consistent at 80 to 100 page views a day whether I post or not. This is largely due to people surfing for random things and landing on some of my archive posts from 2006. Or it is due to whatever Internet trick spammers are using that directs people to my blog from Russian and Turkish Web pages.

The beauty of this is that I get the false feeling of security that about a 100 people a day read my blog regardless of whether I post or not. Shoot since I've posted well over a 1000 posts in the almost ten years I've been blogging, I could die today and I'd still be getting hits on my blog for decades to come.