Monday, May 18, 2015

Blog thoughts

It never occurred to me that creating a new blog would take so much thought and strategizing. For some reason I thought that I would just start the new blog, keep writing posts, and voilĂ --new blog.

But it hasn’t turned out to be quite that simple. On the old blog, within a week of publishing a new post, I would have 20-30 pageviews. If it was something that people found interesting enough to share, I might get 50 or even considerably more. That’s plenty for me. As I’ve said before, I’m not interested in world blog domination.

But for some reason, those readers haven’t transferred over. In this blog, a week after I’ve put up a new post, there are one or maybe two readers. And although those two readers mean the world to me, it doesn’t quite seem worth the effort of maintaining a blog for the three of us. I could just type things out and email them, you know?

So I started doing status updates on Facebook when I put a new post up. That worked great--the first time I did it, I had over a hundred pageviews, an enormous success even by my old standards. But then the next time there were about 45 pageviews, and the time after that, only 17. Which is a little demoralizing, to put it mildly.

Also, at some point a bunch of people un-friended me, which could be completely unrelated, but it’s hard not to take it personally. Really? It was that bad? I’m not sure exactly when it happened, because I didn’t notice until yesterday. I'm paranoid enough to think that I embarrassed myself with my ranting last week, but then I go back and read that post, and it just doesn't embarrass me. Maybe it should, but it doesn't.

Or maybe it was because I dropped an f-bomb. Profanity doesn't bother me all that much. (although I've been reading the Thug Kitchen cookbook, which takes the use of profanity to knew and untold heights and causes even me to raise an eyebrow. whoa.) But I know it is a total deal-breaker to many people. After all, my parents--fully grown adults--use(d) phrases like "H-E-double hockey sticks" and "mell of a hess" to avoid saying the word hell, which barely even qualifies as profanity on my personal scale.

Whatever. I’ve always said that the reason I do this is for me, and that is absolutely true. The benefit I get from typing stuff out and posting it far outweighs the minor embarrassment of finding out that most people don’t find it worth reading. But I’m feeling a bit burned at the moment. So, no more Facebook updates for awhile, which means for the time being, it's just us.

2 comments:

Laurel said...

"mell of a hess" is a new one for me! One of the phrases of exasperation I recall from East Texas is "DOG BITE THE DEVIL". Like, you missed the last bus, or your $20 bill fell out of your pocket: "Dog bite the Devil!".

Debbie said...

Mell of a hess! Ha! HHBL would tell you that I not adverse to profanity. I cannot imagine what you might have done or said that would cause the unfriending.

I will say that my favorite "non-swearing" phrases are Mother Tucker! and Son of a flying fig!