I started the Blahg as a way to share things that I found interesting. For a while, I was really, really, active in maintaining it, spending less time with family or my job than I should have. I took time to setup posts days in advance so the site continued to receive new content when I was away – keeping daily activity going was important to me. It seems that for a while what interested me also interested others. At my most active, I was seeing hundreds of page hits per day. But not all was right for me to keep the site going.
Unfortunately, my visitors were silent – I don’t know which of those hundreds of hits per day were humans reading what I had to share, bots scraping for free content for spam sites, or search engines merely cataloging my updates. All I know is I only received comments from about a dozen different people over a few years of posting. I had always intended the Blahg to be a two-way medium. But reality saw things differently. And after a few years of sharing with nearly no feedback, I lost my drive to maintain the site.
I couldn’t just let my Blahg disappear into the ether, so I kept it “alive” by keeping up my hosting contract and updating the blogging software occasionally, but I couldn’t keep it active either. But now, after 5 years of nothing, I’m ready to try again. I intend to go back to what made me enjoy posting in the first place – things I find interesting and hope others will care about as well. I recognize that Facebook and Twitter are where people go now for news and miscellany, but I prefer something a little longer-lasting than the social media scrawl these platforms offer – thus Blahgging again.
I’ll probably mostly post about interesting techie bits I see online, games and gaming I’m interested in playing/sharing/seeing, and cool new science tidbits that catch my eye. But I’m also interested in politics, and plan on commenting occasionally on what’s happening in the US political arena (and maybe just a smidge on goings-on elsewhere in the world). Hopefully something in this morass of information will snag the eye of a reader here and there, and I’ll get comments this go-around from more visitors. But if not, that’s fine – I’m doing this for me now, and am just peripherally interested in the rest of the world this time. I want a place to post my thoughts which I control and which isn’t held by Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or other such faceless entities.
So hopefully you’ll stay around and see what I have to share. And hopefully you’ll sometimes feel a need to let me know you are here and have thoughts on what I’m sharing. Looking forward to seeing you in the comments!