The first games of the 2013 college football season start one week from tonight. Hence, it's time for my summertime blogging hiatus to come to an end.
With that said: I have to admit that I enjoyed not having to worry about coming up with material for this blog over the past couple of months, and I think it's likely that I will be significantly, and permanently, reducing my posting activity here at Mean Green Cougar Red in the not-too-distant future.
There are two reasons for this.
First, not a lot of people read this blog. As my traffic statistics show, I have only a handful of regular readers, and this includes Facebook friends who visit when I share links to my posts. Very few of my posts generate more than a couple of dozen hits, and the overwhelming majority of visitors to this blog come from Google searches. Occasionally I'll get a flurry of hits, for example when I write about a timely topic on which a lot of people are doing Google searches, or when somebody like Kuff graciously links to one of my posts. Most of the time, however, the amount of traffic this blog receives is barely a trickle. Why should I expend time and energy writing things that are hardly going to be read?
Second, blogging is no longer as enjoyable to me as it used to be. When I first started MGCR, I was very excited about having my own little corner of the interwebs where I could write about anything I wanted. Over time, however, that enthusiasm has waned. Some topics that used to interest me have now come to bore me, and I seem to be less inspired to come up with new material. I feel as if this blog has steadily become more of a chore and less of a hobby for me. Why should I expend time and energy doing something that I don't enjoy?
This isn't to say that I don't ever find blogging to be rewarding, cathartic or therapeutic. I oftentimes do, and for that reason, I don't think I'll ever get to the point where I stop blogging entirely and shut this site down. It's just that my posts will probably become fewer and further between; I'm not going to worry about the number of posts I can generate in a given year, like I've done in the past, or the number of hits I get. I'm going to write because I enjoy it, not because I feel obligated to keep this blog "current." The quantity of my posts will go down, but perhaps the quality of them will increase.
I'll make an announcement when this blog enters that phase. But it probably won't occur until football season ends.
For what it's worth, I came here via the blog you wrote about rabbits in 2004 (hilarious, honestly - a wonderful piece of writing!) and I have enjoyed reading through a number of your posts. Of course, I was actually doing research for a translation I was working on and this was a bit of a detour... I had a personal blog a few years ago but have since shut it down for reasons not far removed from those you have mentioned. I think your writing style is very enjoyable to read, so I do hope you leave the blog up here for others to access. Happy writing!
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