Blogs - Why I Love Them and Why I Want to Do More

 

I like blogs. I read several almost daily. Most of the ones I read are by authors, but I read other kinds of blogs as well.

Some blogs have helped me. For example, when I decided knitting a pair of socks was a great idea, I found a blog to help me figure out the stitches for the heel of the sock. Or when I decided to dual boot my laptop with Linux, while retaining Windows.

Although, I'm not sure why, I've never really logged into my Windows partition. Oh well. The point is the info on a blog was there to help me.

As some of you know I'm not big on social media. I've never understood Facebook and honestly, I'm not sure I ever will. To some extent I do, but mostly I don't. I feel like everybody is shouting, "Hey, look at me, and here's my views on this and that, today I'm upset at this other thing, and oh by the way this is what I had for breakfast with photos."

I can live my life without that madness.

Once upon a time, I did try to be active on Facebook, if I remember correctly, I lasted maybe a week? I fizzled out in a hurry, because I still didn't see the point.

X, the artist formally known as Twitter, I sort of got, but that too was, for the most part, beyond me. However, I think I figured it out some when everyone was leaving the platform. People talked about the friends and the community they'd built on there. Yeah, I can understand that.

I must say I like Instagram. I have started following a few people on that. Maybe the reason why I understand Instagram is it feels more like a blog in many ways. However, I do not post on it since it's photo oriented. I purchased a new phone last year with a nice camera on it and I'd say 95% of the photos I've taken on it so far are of my cats.

Although, I do realize I should not underestimate the power of cat pictures.

Maybe one day I will find a social media platform along the lines of Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram that I like and go all in. Maybe. I wouldn't count on it, but I am open to it.

So that leaves the humble blog.

I think part of what I love about them is you don't have to sign in to anything to read them. There are usually numerous ways to follow them, and in many ways they feel a little more personable. I don't have to deal with ads, unless the blogger has chosen to display them on their site. I'm all for the ads as long as they don't get in the way of the content. Sometimes they do. I try not to go back to those sites.

With all of this being said, since blogs are my chosen form of social media, I want to blog more often on this ye ol blog of mine.

Except there is a problem. What the hell am I going to say?

There are days when I want to write a blog post, but then I can't think of what to write about.

This is why I'm writing about what the heck to write about right now. I wanted to do a blog post, didn't know what to say, so this is what I've come up with.

Then I realized that if I would blog more, I'd probably get better at it. You know, it's like everything else, the more you do it the better you get.

What has brought this on is if you read the last post, I've been at this for four years. Last month I took a look back from where I started. When I did that, I also looked at what I've done on this blog.

To date, I've done less than fifty posts in four years. That really isn't very many posts for the time frame. Especially when this is something I enjoy doing.

I've been reading a few books about blogging lately. Mainly blogging for authors. You know so I can get better at this and have more interesting content and things that people might actually want to read. I'm not sure if they are helping or not.

I figure the worst case scenario is I resort to blogging about my cats. Since I have several photos of them that I could put with the posts.

Best case is I find interesting things to write about that other people want to read. I'm sure my cats would be interesting to other people. The amount of cat videos on YouTube is testament to that. Then again, maybe I'm the only one who thinks that.

Regardless if others find my ramblings interesting or not this blog has served as sort of a journal of my writing journey thus far. Which is what blogs were meant to be originally, web journals. In fact, I've recently went back through some of my posts, because I found them interesting and it reminded me of lessons I've learned as I went along.

Which is one reason I keep doing these mindless ramblings, and why I'll most likely continue to do so.