Am I past Blogging?

I am going to be honest here with you guys, a bit of a confessional piece for you all.

As you can see from the top of this blog, I have been blogging since 2006. That's an awfully long time for a hobby.

When I started out, I did it for pleasure. I liked writing anyway, and I saw it as an outlet, a weekly place to jot my thoughts on the world down. 

It helped me to unload my feelings, when I was in despair over Littlest being unwell and let me talk to others who offered support when I was feeling so low. I thank those people to this day, even though, at that point, I'd met none of them, who took the time to write me a message of love and support. And to tell me to stop being an arse and get help. 

I found it fun, never challenging. Well, sometimes it got a bit challenging, when trolls descended the odd time. Or when I acted like an arse and got my knickers in a knot over naff all in the name of blogging for fun.

It was my little piece of enjoyment.

But for some reason, recently, it hasn't felt that way. I feel like I'm bored. I feel like I want my blog to be just as it was when it started.

However, these days, you can't be crap at backgrounds, they have to be shiny, and smiley and amazing and better than so and so's and ever changing. You can't be clueless on SEO. Or how to change permalinks. Or not be all that fussed on a vanity url on a shiny wordpress self hosted blog platform thingy. It's all Domain Authority (which sneers at Blogspot addresses) and no follow, and Page Rank. 

I scratch my head at all of those, simply as I never felt that I was a Computer nerd or an Internet God, no, I was a writer. Simple. As I ranted at Facebook earlier, if I was a writer and this was still the 80s, I would be on a typewriter. Or at the most, a ZX Spectrum. 

I am computer illiterate. Or not computer illiterate but modern blogging illiterate.

I don't get the enjoyment anymore. I get more out of cooking.

I don't get a proud feeling over my blog anymore. I feel like the blog equivalent of an OAP.

My peers, from the olden days, are very small in number. Some of my old fave bloggers gave up years ago. Those left are voicing the same as me, where we feel out to pasture, a relic of the old days when blogs looked crap. We don't want to keep up with all these changes, the goalposts move too often. 

I don't want to close my blog down. I don't want to admit defeat. But I feel my chance of doing something worthwhile with it, which was my goal from 2009 onwards, well, it's well and truly buggered really isn't it? I see blogs I recall as new and whom I gave advice to as a wise elder (!) doing amazing things, whilst I'm sat on the shelf getting dustier.

I think perhaps that I'm right in voicing there is more pressure on us blogs now than there ever was. 

 

What do you think?