How many blogs have you started? How many have you got on the go at the moment? And when I say ‘on the go’ I mean in the loosest sense. Maybe you haven’t updated it in a while (months and months). But it is still yours.
I have one blog that is on a sub-domain of a service that offered a free lifetime WordPress blog in the hope that some customers would upgrade to a paid-for site on their own domain. I only remember I have the blog when I get alerts to upgrade plugins. Other than that, it sits lonely and semi-abandoned.
I wonder how many semi-abandoned blogs there are in the universe?
Do you use an RSS reader? They are a pretty good way of finding out what has been abandoned.
You may know how it goes. You follow a whole lot of blogs that are on your chosen interest and you read the feeds.
Then you forget to do that for a while. When you go back there is a little number next to each blog. It represents the number of new posts. That’s when you see that half of the blogs have not posted anything in months and months.
I start blogs with a clear idea of why I am starting them. One blog is to test WordPress themes without committing them to my main blog. Another is where I write about political stuff relevant to a UK audience. A third is a support blog for an e-commerce site. And another is… and so it goes, on and on.
Now ask me about how many blogs I have shut down. Lots. Some served their purpose and some of my ‘clear ideas’ turned out not to be so clear after all.
But the big takeaway that I’ve learned in all of this is that new blogs are easy and older blogs are more difficult.
New blogs are a blank canvas. They don’t say anything about how they should be. They don’t wave a wagging finger saying that the new blog post you are about to write is just not good enough.
New blogs don’t have an audience, so there is no one to please or displease – yet.
But once a blog gets under way, I have to step up to the plate and know what I am doing. No pressure.
Well, this blog is mostly about photography. So I’ll get my skates on and photograph. Pity about the dreary weather. Roll on Spring.
Photograph Works 
Thoughtful article, David – and I particularly like the evocative “wagging finger” image. 😊
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You have multiple blogs?? Holy cow – I struggle to keep up with one! That is, I *would* struggle if I hadn’t long since given up the aspiration to blog weekly. Turns out it’s easy to keep up if you abandon all performance goals! I started mine to get the creative juices flowing … and it worked, so now most of my writing time goes to my novel, and my blog is just a place to let a shirt tail / laundry / breast hang out when I feel like it. Sometimes one just wants to share an idea, a mood or an experience. I had something more structured in mind when I started … Maybe one day I’ll go back to that, because I have LOTS of stories to tell and it would be nice to have a structure to hang them on. But for now I’m just winging it… 🙂
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When I read posts by people who say something like ‘I am going to blog every day or every week’ I think Oh oh, you are setting yourself up for failure. The thin is that for the blog that supports our shop, the wisdom is that if you want Google to crawl regularly then you have to post regularly. It doesn’t have to be daily or weekly- just regularly. Tell Google what to expect. Easier said than done. I’m with you on personal posts on personal blogs – they come when I have something to say.
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Too many to count. WPcom makes it way too easy! When I was self-hosted, there were only two: my knitting site-now on WPcom and a bit of a zombie at the moment, and my personal site (not the one linked to my username), which I shuttered in 2014. Given the number of “big name” blogs that I followed and which stopped posting months and years ago, it seems to be a trend.
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Agreed. It makes me wonder whether Gutenberg is seeking to solve the wrong problem
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Well … I’ve had a few. 2011 I did the ‘blog a day’ thing and actually completed 365 posts. I’m too embarrassed to go back and look at it, but I met a bunch of nice people thanks to that WordPress project. That was the positive part of it.
There must be thousands and thousands of vacant blogs sitting around, just here in in WordPress … try and sign up for a snazzy blog name — they were all taken back in 2006 and they didn’t do anything with it. I have one, myself, from 2006, that I’ve hardly ever used.
I’ve lost it … my ability to write incessant gibberish even.
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I didn’t see any gibberish in what you write 😊
Thanks for commenting 😊
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What a good question! I have my first and oldest blog. I spun two blogs off that for birds/bugs and quotations. I have three blogs that I do for not-for-profit groups and causes. I have one genealogy blog.
I don’t have to meet any deadlines or obligations for any of them – so I can just blog when the mood strikes!
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Glad you liked the question 🙂
I am working on my family tree, been doing it for years in fits and starts. Is your genealogy blog about your genealogy or more about the subject of genealogy? I am always on the lookout for tips.
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Nice that you run blogs for non profits. How did that come about?
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