Fiat Lux

Four years ago today, Fiat Lux came online.

I’ve averaged a post every 1.21 days since then. Not bad, for a solo effort (plus one guess post from Scott).

I’ve had days where fewer than a dozen people came to my site, and a few days where more than 6,000 people stopped by.

I’ve had days where I couldn’t wait to get something up onto the blog, and days where I’ve though about shutting it down entirely.

I’ve learned a lot about the mechanics of web marketing — SEO, how to build traffic, how to get links — that I use in my professional work.

I like to think that the discipline of writing this blog has made me a better writer (although this post is probably not one of me better efforts in that regard). At the very least, I’m more aware of my weaknesses as a writer now, and hopefully I do a better job of working through them.

Lately, though, it feels like most of what I want to write about is me, me, me. And this blog is at it’s best when it’s not all about me. Not sure how to resolve that contradiction right now; perhaps I need a few more days away from the blog to get my groove back.

I closed my first post like this:

What next? Who knows. But I think that I’d like to blog the journey.

And now, 4 years later, I still do. So let’s see what happens.

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Thinking about starting a blog? Then this article is definitely worth reading.

The one thing the author is overlooking (although perhaps he’ll say something about this is a later post) is that starting a blog actually isn’t the hard part. Keeping one up is. I’d be willing to bet that a significant percentage of new blogs get abandoned within the first 30 days. Just in the past six months, I know of three people who’ve started blogs, put a couple of posts out, and then stopped.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the saying goes. Like any other activity, not everyone who tries blogging is going to like it enough to want to make it a regular part of their life.

I have to get going to meet some friends for brunch, but I’m going to start thinking about pulling some tips for “how to keep on blogging” into a post.

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Lately, I’ve been having a real problem with some WordPress blogs. For reasons that I do not understand, comments I leave seem to vanish into the bit bucket as soon as I press the Submit button. This is getting very frustrating and makes me feel like not reading those blogs anymore, because I don’t want to waste my time writing up comments that just go ‘poof’. I suppose it just goes to show how much the ability to comment has — at least for me — become an embedded part of the blog experience.

The blogs in question are all run by different people on different servers, and possibly even with different versions of WordPress, although I haven’t checked to verify that last point.

I know about comment moderation, but I’ve been assured by some of the site owners in question that my comments were not moderated out. Apparently they’re not even making it into the moderation queue.So the question is, why? What else could be wrong?

It’s occurred to me that the problem could be on my end. I use Firefox almost exclusively, and it could be that this is some subtle browser glitch. Scott has told me to try using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox to see if that’s the problem, but frankly, if it is, that’s not going to be a helpful solution; I don’t want to go back to IE just so I can leave comments on some blogs.

A quick search of the WordPress FAQ and Forums doesn’t provide any easy answers, and I haven’t done an in-depth dig into other possible sources of answers yet. I’ll be looking at this question a bit more over the weekend. If I come up with a good answer, I’ll update this post.

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Ezra’s got a blog post about the pros / cons of blogging anonymously or under a pseudonym. It’s an issue that comes up periodically.

It did get me thinking, though — it’s easy to talk about blogging’s potential downsides. What are some of the positive things that have come out of having a blog?

Everyone’s answer will be different, I think. For me, it’s definitely helped my writing — I’ve always been a decent writer, but I’m a faster one now, more confident in my ‘voice’ and hopefully a bit more polished.

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As Yogi Berra might say, “It’s deja vu all over again.” Remember the spate of articles published in the mid-late 1990s about people who used the then-new medium called the Internet? What did many of them focus on? Obsessive Internet use. So today, The New York Times writes about blogs. And what do they focus on? Obsessive bloggers.

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession.

Can’t the mainstream media come up with something else to write about? There are probably a couple of million blogs out here in the blogosphere. There’s got to be something more newsworthy in all that wealth of punditry, rants, raves, personal details, pet and child photos, and general snarkiness. There’s got to be at least a few good stories in there somewhere.

The cynic in me suggests that if mainstream media were to take a more realistic look at blogs and blogging, they would have to ask themselves some hard questions about whether they don’t have some things to learn about reporting from the blogosphere. (Jeff Jarvis has touched on this subject over at Buzz Machine). So instead, they look at the freakshow aspects.

I certainly don’t consider myself to be obsessed with my blog. There are days I post multiple times, there are days I don’t post at all. If I don’t post for a couple of days, I do start feeling like I ought to get something up here, but it’s hardly a compulsion. And I suspect many - dare I say most? - casual bloggers feel the same way.

But of course, that’s not newsworthy.

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