Thoughts on Blogging

I've decided I must not be committed enough to the blogging concept. It appears that most of the interesting blogs I read (rather than the ones that aren't interesting) do a whole lot more stuff than I do here at HIAHS.

Pictures: Other bloggers seem to use pictures. We have a digital camera, but it is always in my husband's possession, so I never have access to it. Taking film pictures and scanning them is just silly. I could search for associated pictures on the internet, but am (apparently) too lazy to figure out how to add that to my blog. I'm just words with nothing pretty to look at.

Tags: Other bloggers categorize their posts to allow for better searching of their content. There are custom categories, and technorati categories, and del.i.cious categories, and other bloggers use these nifty little tools. This has just always seemed like too much effort to get started (do I have to recategorize all my old posts, etc.), and so I haven't done it.

Counters: Other bloggers know how many people come to read their blogs. It seems they also know what domain those folks came from (allowing extrapolation to country of origina, etc.). I went looking for one of those nifty programs once before, but the first one I found cost money, so I quit looking.

Searches: Other bloggers know what searches are used to allow people to find their blogs. This seems to be linked to the previous part about counters -- maybe it's the same software? Regardless, I don't really think people find my blog randomly, so I don't imagine there are too many interesting search criteria used to get here.

Then, there is the fact that a lot of other folks just seem to post way more often than I do. They either have way more interesting lives, or they find topics or regular themes or something else to motivate additional post-fodder. I know we're all supposed to live our own lives and not worry about keeping up with the Joneses, but I just keep asking myself why I go to other people's blogs, and whether there are some things I could do to make my blog more appealing to the masses.

And then I realize that would take a lot of time and effort. Time and effort that I'm not really willing to commit to blogging. And so my few readers will continue to be stuck with no pictures, no categorization of posts, no counters, and no recaps of what searches brought readers here. And I will continue to be content that my posts don't garner 50 comments apiece. And I'll keep enjoying reading the blogs of people who do choose to spend that much time on their blogs. And I'll stop starting sentences with "And."