Looking Back

This blog is soon to be a year old. My first post was at the end of last August. At the time I committed to myself to maintain a weblog for a year, then decide if I wanted to continue. Anything less than a year seemed to be less than a serious commitment.

Here are my observations as the year ends.

***Daily blogging is a lot of fun, and Bloglines has been a life saver. Without an aggregator, blogging is really a grind. I am reading more than ever before and have exposed myself to a variety of ideas and opinion that I would never have experienced without blogging. There is a built-in discipline to blogging that makes the blogger work at getting and staying informed.

***Traffic is a great ego trip. The few times that I have been linked by a high-traffic site my hit counts have multiplied impressively. It is clear, however, that my basic traffic is lackluster. The forty per day average is deceptively larger than it really is since half or more are the result of search hits that did not aim to read Hoots' Place but were searching for something in particular that I just happened to have mentioned.

***Looking back at the archives, a lot of the material now seems pedestrian. My impulse is to delete the whole thing and start over, but at some future point I might want to look back at something and it wouldn't be there, so I'll hang on to what I have like that collection of junk in basement, file and closet storage. "You never know when you might need..." You know the drill.

***Beginning soon I plan to start reducing the number of posts to two or three times a week. I think the result will be more thoughtful, less "Me, too!" and qualitatively better than the Boing-Boing approach I have been using. I love Boing-Boing, by the way. I couldn't go without it. But that approach, like 3 Quarks, is not my gift.

***I am very frustrated with the dropped sidebar and haven't figured out how to fix it. When I look at last September and October archived the sidebar is properly aligned to the top with the content, but for some reason last August, and all the other months, as well as now, the sidebar hangs down past the body. Very, very frustrating. (Wouldn't you know! As soon as I published this post the sidebar floated to the top! I have no clue why! I did look at a couple of archived months and they were still hanging, but st the moment the thing seems to be in place. Go figure...)

***I treasure comments but most readers seem to be lurking without commenting. Catfish and a couple others have felt okay about leaving comments, but I know the people apart from the blog, so that really doesn't count. My hope for blogging was to cultivate a little group of people of similar but not necessarily identical opinion with whom I could dialogue. I have observed that kind of community only rarely. Most comment threads tend to run to argumentative tangents rather than group conversations, so maybe that is a hope best left to dreamland.

I expect to add to this post as I think about it over the next few days.
In the meantime, thanks to the faithful few who have been reading. I am thinking about posting on Mondays and Fridays. The Monday post would be the result of weekend reading and a post mortem of the week before, and Fridays would be a compilation of what might have been scrappy little tidbits the reset of the time, but hopefully better organized and with the fluff blown off.