Saturday, September 05, 2009

Blogging - why I do it (or don't a lot of the time)

I started this blog almost 5 years ago now (October 2004), and have had periods of activity and many months of inactivity. Part of my problem is that I have never seen this as a priority, and when life gets busy out goes the blogging. However, I have made some good friends and met (virtually) some really interesting people.

I generally only get 30 -40 unique visitors a week on this site (with the post below removed from the stats) - mainly because I haven't worked hard at getting external links and building traffic. However, one post of mine bucks this trend completely, even though it is now 2 years old, Porn Stars, Womanhood and the wallpaper of our lives. I probably get 15 - 20 hits a day on this one post, mainly referred from Google searches for pornography (including some deeply disturbing and very illegal searches). Hopefully it will make an occasionally visitor stop and think.

Earlier this year I started a political blog, The Digger, but have stopped for now after finding the whole political blogging environment utterly negative and disheartening. Maybe I'll have more stomach for it soon.

My latest venture is Everything Folk, a news and reviews site for another passion of mine, roots and folk music. I decided to do this one differently, and wanted to learn more about the technical side of blogging, so I am hosting this one with Wordpress and am now going about the process of learning to use this incredibly flexible piece of software. I started it as I saw a gap - there wasn't really a blog about the current growth of interest in this area (outside of BBC and Guardian sites which are updated every week or so). We'll see how it goes, but please do go and pay it a visit - you may see something you actually quite like!

What are we here for?

Google