I’ve been a blogger for the past ten years and I have seen many changes over the years. Experimenting with several kinds of blogs finally allowed me to settle on WordPress for a number of reasons. Of one of these reasons is that there are comparatively less casual bloggers, I’ve found, on WordPress than others. In the past, WordPress seemed to be limited to actual former bloggers and everything else, such as Blogger, was for casual writers. I have no problem with casual writers in the literal sense but when I speak of them, I am talking about those who refuse to type proper English. I understand that they simply want a domain to speak their thoughts so the way they write doesn’t…count? It does. Even if your idea is interesting, how are people supposed to take you seriously if you write with as much language competency as a 2nd-grader-who-just-discovered-blogging does? Even if you don’t care about who reads your blog, do you want to look back on what you wrote and see yourself as foolish (or even more foolish than you are now)? Whether you are writing this for yourself or someone else, do it properly.
The fact that there are more and more blogs these days doesn’t help it either. A large number of my friends have started blogs and some, I prompted them to do so. I won’t be complaining about my friends starting blogs though, because I know they will write properly — not like some other people out there. However, you might say that if I don’t like how some people write, I won’t read it again. That’s true — I won’t.
Still, more and more blogs are cluttering our online space which is limited, and it bothers me to the core. There are more of them now because while it was expected that women would take on the online form of a diary, men have decided that it’s cooler to have a blog–it’s not quite a diary. Even though the blog is essentially an online diary, it’s suddenly culturally okay for men to have blogs. Please take note that I am talking about the casual and casual-ish bloggers, not the intensely interesting bloggers out there. Most bloggers are fanatical about the idea of starting a blog simply because it’s free, and some people actually pay for these domains. Might I say, that the space is not really free and that the more people start blogs, the more expensive the internet gets. Those who don’t make use of this space is not only making it hard for society but also for themselves. Even if some blog sites actively search out ‘dead blogs’, which are those that people abandon for years, they won’t be able to get rid of the clutter fast enough. If you do not write for half a year, just don’t bother. If you don’t write anything of value or have anything of value for a quarter of a year, maybe you might want to delete your blog. I know you, casual and casual-ish bloggers, because I’ve been there. Even if you don’t drop your blog now without deleting it, you might just end up doing that later. Not taking blogging seriously, as a kid, I would have multiple blogs. Then I would just abandon them all at once when I got uninterested or was too involved in something else to post. Then you hope that maybe it’ll still be there for the next five years and you can read about your life because you had been too lazy to try to remember what you think at the time was memorable. In five years, you might find your blog and read about how strange you were. Maybe in five years, you’ll lose the URL to your blog or maybe it’ll be deleted by then. If you want to keep memories, write it on a word document and save each post on your external hard drive every time you write one. I actually have a friend who did this and I think it was a wonderful idea. If you plan to share your ideas and have them live forever online, make sure you keep posting–and maybe support the provider / domain with donations.
I have two blogs that I’ve maintained to this day. I probably won’t stop blogging unless something drastic comes up, but I’ll still know what to do. Unless you’ve forgotten your password and it magically becomes irretrievable, which happens, please delete your blog if you won’t be using it anymore. Then, you can save your archives of your blog on your computer and/or an external hard drive.
Happy blogging!