February 1st 2016

I would love to say I'm back with a fresh perspective and a new attitude, ready to tackle the new year and post tons of great content and really interact with my readers.

I would. Really. Love to say that. But I kinda can't.

I have been struggling with blog ideas lately. After taking some time off to do holiday things and get a bit of a break, I really thought it would just kind of naturally come back to being fun and exciting and worth reading. But I don't know if it will.

When I first started this blog, I wanted to really share my views on Nonsteading and why technology is our friend. In the past 6 months or so, I've written over 100 posts and the most popular ones were a breaking news story and a Top 10 list of British TV shows. Occasionally I would post something that really connected with someone, and that was great. But am I really writing enough stellar material to justify publishing something every day?

I used to get so frustrated looking over my Twitter feed, seeing authors and creative types resharing the same blog post for a week. It really seemed like you should post your stuff, share it around on the social sites the day it came out and maybe for one additional day, but then leave it alone. I never felt right trying to force people to read my words, and I guess I still don't. I also hate feeling like I'm "selling" someone on my point of view. If you want to see what I've written, well, there's links to stuff, enjoy. I always felt like people would get sick of seeing me link the same blog post 300 times in one week, because I had not posted any new content.

I guess what I'm really wondering is, am I alone in this? Does anyone else feel like you should only market fresh work? Does anyone else mute/unfollow people who post the same link over and over every few hours? Should you publish something everyday, just to have new material or should you wait until there's some real gem and only publish once or twice a month? Should you only blog about big events like releases and preorder dates?

Until my holiday break I was getting about two thousand unique views a month here, and I felt like that was great. What I'm wondering now is, what made you visit? Was it an interesting tag line? Was it the title of the blog post? Was it the repetition of the link? Was it that you actually enjoyed reading what I wrote? What exactly should I be aiming for?

Now, yes, that may seem lazy, asking readers to tell me what they want to read, but I am honestly curious as to the draw. If everyone told me that Caturday was my biggest pull, that doesn't mean I'm going to just turn the blog into one giant Caturday machine. I'm more curious in honest feedback about what I've done so far, and what people would like to see more of. Most of the time I don't get any comments on these posts (maybe a few +1's on G+) so hopefully someone will take pity and leave their thoughts.

Hope

Garden of Ideaden

Well, my blog these past few days has been a little limp. I've been missing my normal sparky word choice and witty repartee. I'm going to share something with you here, it's a bit personal. But I feel that any good relationship includes sharing, so you deserve to know.

Damn phone knows who's boss now.

My phone deleted my idea pad.

I have this spot on my phone where I write down all these ideas that I get throughout the day, week, etc. Then when I have time, I sit down and craft eloquent blog posts. The problem is, when I sit down to write, I can never come up with ideas. I have to allow my brain to spark creatively in its natural habitat, away from the computer. This leads to notes, words, phrases that later become brilliant blog entries. It's a veritable Garden of Ideaden. And now it's gone.

I had entries dating back to last year of things I wanted to write fun short article-format, infographic-laden missives about. But now I'm starting from scratch, so my blogs may be a little spartan until I build back up that creative bulwark. Or if I can figure out a way to find it in a cloud it may have been saved in. I'm still searching. I might have emailed it to myself once... that's an area to explore.

Regardless! Thank you for your patience while I ferret out new brilliance from my daily life in a substantial pool of random thoughts tailored for blog-filling. It should not take long.