For close to two months now, I've been rather negligent of this
blog. The reasons are numerous, however the following is a list of
the primary causes.
- My wife is back to work as a laboratory scientist, now that
maternity leave is complete, so "free time" (if such a thing exists
with two small children) is getting squeezed entirely out,
and...
- ...Professionally I've been extraordinarily busy,
pursuing some new business avenues and opportunities,
making it very difficult to allocate
time to finishing articles-in-progress.
A partial motivation in maintaining a blog/original content system
at the outset was to get some "cheap" (if the time dedicated to
creating content was valueless) PR to drum up some
consulting/software development customers, however that necessity
has largely disappeared (and it was only intended as a fail-safe
anyways. I never had to actively look for clients, instead
relying upon business contacts and word of mouth. I've actually had
to turn away most blog sourced business due to a lack of
capacity). Furthermore, as a PR vehicle for 360notes.com, I think the product itself will
earn far more attention than any pimping in these entries ever
would.
- Lastly, but certainly not least, the incredible success of the
DNS
entries makes everything else almost seem
anticlimactic.
I remember when I first started posting online papers, getting
giddy to see that a half a dozen people read them in a week (and I
carefully did reverse-IPs to see where they came from, following
every referral back to the source), which I knew by downloading and
looking at the logs every 15 minutes. As time went on, however, and
readership increased, the "dose" required to have any motivational
effect inflated, such that having several thousand distinct viewers
(e.g. 10,000+ "hits", however nebulous that metric is) in a given
day starts to almost seem like a failure (I see newspaper articles
gushing about whatever human interest blog of the day caught their
eye, and it makes me cynical seeing that they only have 600,000
visitors in a month. "That's only 20,000 visitors a day!"). It's
strangely discouraging to think that new efforts will yield only a
small portion of the attention the disposable DNS entries
did.
I'm completely over the "hit craving" stage that most
bloggers/original content producers go through, and almost entirely
disregard the stats. From this perspective, and hoping that I can
find a small amount of available time, I'm going to finish up some
long-in-the-making articles, along with some other content that
I've been wanting to explore. Through it all I promise to disregard
the stats.
Thanks for reading along, and have a fantastic day and week
ahead!
Dennis