100th Post!

It's almost hard to believe, but the numbers don't lie: this is my one-hundredth post. Yep, thirty three miscellaneous posts, thirty three advice posts, and thirty two philosophy posts (we don't talk about that Thanksgiving-week Friday post) have finally brought me to this point, and like the then soon-to-come end of my long, strange trip, I feel this occasion warrants some reflection about what I have done so far, why I did it, and what I may do in the future. After all, if reflection--especially reflection on those kinds of topics--is not the very essence of philosophy, I don't know what is... ok, the Socratic method is a better candidate for the essence of philosophy. Point is, I'm going to reflect.

I remember when I first started this blog. I caught the blogging bug after reading the article How to get your blog crashed by WoW.com on WoW.com. Something about the article struck a chord with me. I suppose it was similar to the feeling I get when reading an online strategy guide for a game I plan on buying; I seem to have a penchant for going into a completely new situation with some foreknowledge, rather than going in blind. Anyways, something about that article made me realize that I wanted to blog. Thing is, I had tried blogging in the past and could never stick with it. I had two dead blogs that were the I-write-when-I-feel-like-writing kind of blogs that were simply my thoughts of the day. They failed because I lost motivation to write in them, so what could I do differently to avoid losing motivation in this new venture?

I settled on two things to keep me going as I started this new blog. One, I would keep to a schedule with my posting. I always have an easier time doing things if I set out a schedule by which to do them, so I figured blogging would be the same, hence the Monday/Wednesday/Friday posting scheme. Secondly, I decided to focus my efforts on one subject, rather than just write about what I was feeling that day. I knew that would make it easier to stick with the blog, since I always have an easier time coming up with ideas when there are some restrictions placed on me, and I knew subconsciously that writing about one topic would be more likely to generate a steady readership. I didn't acknowledge it then, but I wanted to be read. There was some post on some blog (sorry I can't be more specific, but I can't for the life of me remember where I read it) on getting started in blogging that stated that anyone who says they are "blogging for themselves and themselves only" is likely deceiving themselves. Blogging is a public medium, so if someone writes on a blog, they likely want their work to be read, if only on a subconscious level. If that were not the case, they would likely write in a LiveJournal instead.

So, on that fateful Monday night, I wrote the post that started it all. Some of my earlier posts were posts I knew I wanted to write from day one, such as a philisophical analysis of the Barrel series on XKCD, how to level fishing without being bored, and why you should not rush to the level cap. It was nice to finally get those thoughts out on some tangible medium, and the thought of others potentially reading those thoughts made it even more tantalizing. That last point is rather ironic, because one defining feature of those early months was the lack of comments on my posts. Aside from one encouraging comment by Larisa of The Pink Pigtail Inn on my first post, I didn't get a single comment on any of my posts until November. That's five months that I, for all intents and purposes, wrote for myself and myself only.

Why did I do it? Because I love blogging. Sure, the fact that people are reading the things I write and commenting on them factors into it, but at the end of the day, I love expressing my opinions and ideas in a public medium. I also enjoy writing, as evidenced by the fact that I won NaNoWriMo 2009, but the usual genres of writing (fiction, poetry, song-writing, etc.) just never did anything for me. Something about blogging made it different; it was probably the fact that blogging appealed to my practical nature in some way. Blogging became a way to exercise my writing skills that I could do on a regular basis and enjoy. In short, I found a hobby, and I loved it.

The fruits of my labor paid off when I finally had the opportunity to market my work in an appropriate way. I had never been one for self-advertising, and it was mostly a lack of marketing that caused my first few dozen posts to go un-commented. The reason I never self-marketed was because I could never find a way to namedrop my blog without seeming like I was shamelessly advertising myself. What I wanted was a way to name-drop my blog that was still relevant to the topic at hand, and that opportunity came with the wow.com post World of Warcraft and Philosophy now on sale. Since I was in the middle of reading World of Warcraft and Philosophy at the time, I posted my thoughts on it and also mentioned the fact that the book has been out for a while (in order to gently say that WoW.com was late to the game), a fact I knew since I googled "World of Warcraft and Philosophy" before starting my blog to see if this niche was already taken and had found the book by doing so. Thus I knew the book had been around at least as long as my blog, and my blog had been out for quite some time. I then left the link to my blog in parentheses ("in case you are interested"), and that got people to actually read my blog. I only get a comment here and there, but considering that I had been writing for myself for so long, that was enough for me.

My big break, though, would come later, about three months later, when WoW.com posted an article in response to my post on how the new emblem system ruined heroics. I remember the day it happened quite well. You see, I have blogger set up to e-mail me when someone comments on one of my posts, so I got an a-mail when the first comment on that post was left. I then got another e-mail, telling me another comment had been posted. This was my first post to ever receive more than one comment, so I thought to myself, "Wow, I must have really struck a chord with my readers." Then I got a third one and thought to myself, "Ok, this wouldn't happen under normal circumstances. WoW.com didn't link to me or something, did they?... Oh boy, they did." I got a total of twenty-seven comments on that one post, and I started getting comments on my old post as well. I had finally been noticed.

As exciting as this was for me, I also got butterflies in my stomach. Why? I suppose it was because having an audience exposed the fact that I hadn't held my posts to as high of a standard as I would have if I knew people were going to read them. For example, I'll be the first to admit that my suggestions at the end of my post on how the new emblem system ruined heroics weren't good ones. I only wrote them so that post wouldn't be another post full of complaints without any actual helpful content. In hindsight, though, I wouldn't have written them if I were more concerned with the quality of my post, because they were just bad. Still, I left them in because at that point, I was still mostly writing for myself. My lack of readership meant that this blog was a safe little haven for me where quality didn't matter as much as it does in the other aspects of my life. Once I had a bigger audience, that changed, and the fact that my less-than-good posts could now be scrutinized was what gave me butterflies. Of course, I didn't dwell on that point, because I had finally accomplished my goal in starting this blog: I had become a read* blogger.

So that's my reflection on sevens months and one hundred posts. I look forward to seeing what the future brings this blog, and I hope you'll be there to see it with me.

*On a different note, we really need to agree on a different spelling for the past-tense version of the verb "to read."