Many people have instant messaged or emailed me lately about my blog. It’s getting relatively well-known, and it’s advertised pretty much everywhere I have a presence – in web forums, social networking sites, and so on. I said in early April when I first made this blog that I would try my best to update on a daily basis. In the beginning, I was doing great; I had several blog posts already written and ready to be posted. I scheduled future posting dates so my blog would automatically post my blog entries for me. Then, I started to fall behind.
In only two weeks or so, I started running out of topics. I started posting utterly useless blog entries, like the riddle about the dead man. Someone specifically commented and asked if I was running out of topics to write about. Unfortunately, I had to resort to riddles again two weeks later because I was once again behind on my blogging.
This made me think about why I was blogging in the first place. Way back on April 5, 2009, I said that I was blogging to keep up with developing trends. People are centralizing their lives on social networking and other forms of internet-based socialization, and being an owner of a website, I wanted to keep up with the "popular thing" to keep my website modern and interesting. To put it simply, I started blogging because people have told me that they like reading what I write (especially Chronicles of a Roommate), and they wanted to read more.
As I was being pushed to pump out blog entries faster than I could handle, my writing became sloppy and boring. The topics I was writing about became meaningless and argumentless. My naturally debating nature went dormant, and I presented the topics I wrote about in a way that made the readers just not care.
Starting yesterday night and finishing this late afternoon, I changed hosts for web blogs. I originally had used Blogger, a blogging website now owned by Google. I now use a free, downloadable version of WordPress. I installed it into one of my databases on my main website, and I’m now maintaining every aspect of my blog. The good thing is that I have nearly full control of the features of my blog and now feel more comfortable using the interface. The bad thing is that I have free hosting from x10Hosting, and whenever the servers experience down time (which is quite frequently, seeing as I’m using a free service), my entire blog goes down with it. I guess that’s just something we have to deal with.
Making this change more or less a milestone, I’ve decided to change my viewpoints and opinions on blogging as well. Now, instead of throwing out a new blog post everyday, they’re going to be more spaced out; there could be anywhere between zero to two days between separate blog posts. However, now they’re going to be slightly longer and more meaningful, and hopefully, more entertaining to read. Starting from now, you might actually need the full five minutes to finish reading what I have to say.
On that note, I would like to successfully declare that I am done changing web hosts and am pretty much settled here. I had some frustrating times when my website went down earlier today while I was transferring blog posts and comments. To make it even worse, my website was up for a minute, then down the next, then up the next minute, and (guess what?) down the minute after that. (Just to let you guys know, all the old blog posts and all of your old comments are now on this blog.) Now that I’m done, I’ll concentrate more on producing good material and less on glaring at my monitor.
So it begins tomorrow – the very first, meaningful, and hopefully comical blog post. I have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be about, but I’m not telling yet. I guess you’ll have to wait and find out.
Edit (May 20, 2009, 11:51 PM): I have gone back to old blog posts and deleted unnecessary posts or combined two relevant, shorter posts into one. You will notice the differences immediately.