On my daily perusal of the blogosphere, I came across WDKY's post about "keeping it real." It was very enlightening.This blog started out six months ago as simply a way to keep in touch with the family while I was deployed to Qatar. It quickly became a military/political blog, and then just a place for me to ramble as the audience grew....
I've spent many hours tinkering with this page as a thing to do, like tinkering with a car engine. Each day I added or subtracted, tweaked here and there. I caved and spent money on a haloscan account today. I added blogpages and then deleted them when I realized that I had my hands full enough with Desert Odyssey.
My original intent was to knock this off when I got home. That date was then pushed back to when Odie finally decides to show up. To be honest, I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to knock this off then, either.
This – my – blog was started with the sole purpose of putting some thoughts down on “paper”… something to mark my passage through an interesting phase of my life, a phase of change and adjustment. And perhaps something to look back on when I need to put my life into some kind of perspective. Somewhere along the way, it’s possible that I forgot this purpose, and began to write with an audience in mind. Is this a bad thing? Does it make what I say any less authentic? I suspect the answer to both questions is no… well, it’s a definite no to the second, I assure you. I want what I write to be a true account of who I am; I think it has been and my intention is that it always will be. And I suspect that those who happen to have stumbled across me in “real life” would be quick to point out any inconsistency between the person they know me to be and the persona who presents himself to the world through this particular medium. It’s a useful control measure, isn’t it?
I've had to, more than once, stop and ask myself if what I was writing was what I really thought, or if I was trying to appeal to, or gain, readers.
That's bad.
The good is that the answer has always been "yes," in that they are really my thoughts.
The bad is that, like many other blogs I've seen, I have gotten all wrapped up in what I manage to garner for results on my sitemeter homepage, or what I had grown or regressed into in the TTLB Ecosystem.
The post on WDKY's site was a celebration of hitting 30,000 hits. He started his blog the month after I started mine.
30,000 hits. I was stoked when I hit 5,000 last month. Granted, he takes part in HNT pretty regularly.
Maybe I should start stripping down.
Either way, I'm pretty sure that I'd like to keep doing this--but it's time for a change around here. I'm definitely going to keep the name, but I'd certainly like a new look. I'm even strongly considering a move to Wordpress or Typepad, if just to see what they have to offer--the better sites seem to use them. Or maybe just getting my own domain name.
I am
writing blogging
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