Blogging

Five or six years ago I wouldn’t have needed such a challenge to get me blogging. Blogging was part of my daily routine, back then.

I went and looked through the numbers for my posts over the last six years, 2007 – 2012. I looked at the months January, February and March. Over the years there’s definitely been a decrease in the number of my posts. This graph depicts the decline clearly.

What’s caused this decline?

A combination of things, I think.

At first I thought that maybe blogging just got boring for me. You know, you do something for a while and after a while you get sick of it and you do it less. But no, I don’t think boredom has that much to do with the slump in posts. I find that when I do get back into it, I enjoy blogging as much as I ever have.

I think Twitter got the better of me. It’s so much easier to just write short, 140-character sentences.

As Ampersand Duck says:

How many times a day do I think ‘I must blog that’ and then just Facebook it? I guess it’s the actual sitting down to compose something, tracking down the photos I want to use, resizing them, and all that.

(Obviously I don’t Facebook things, given that I don’t have a Facebook account. Twitter takes that role for me.)

Also, with Twitter I can look at it, post to it, have conversations with others, anywhere I am. All my devices have it, so it’s convenient and easy to access. Blogging is more long form, takes more effort – even if I do have a blogging app on my iPad. (Now that I’m trying to get back into the swing of blogging, I’ll have to see if I can get into using the app more.)

Speaking of using apps, it’s ironic, really, because I think it’s the iPad that’s had a big role in this decline. Instead of getting out of bed to write (which I used to do, almost religiously), these days my habit is to lie in bed and read instead. I don’t know if lying in bed trying to blog on the iPad is going to be as easy as it is using my laptop. It’s probably more involved to find links, and adjust images (as Ampersand Duck says above) on the iPad.

It was quite hard to decide what B-word to blog about. I thought of the following words when trying to work out what to write about: Books (but I blog about reading all the time), Blogging (ha), Breakfast, Bands (don’t ask me why), Brands (hmm), Bach and Beethoven…

I promise I’ve gotten my blogging-about-blogging urges out of my system now and will blog about other, hopefully interesting, topics for the rest of this month.

It was a glorious day yesterday (a glorious long weekend, actually). I think we’re having the last gasp of summer at the moment. This photo for Rebeccah, the sky yesterday afternoon, from my front yard:

May your skies be blue!