A New Year: Some Resolutions Pertaining to Blogging

Could some one tell me what exactly happened to the year 2010?  I feel like it just kinda disappeared.  And at the same time so much happened that it feels like it was an eternity.  A whirlwind conundrum is what I have concluded it is.  Time is an illusion.

So as the year winds down and a new one gears up, I have been thinking a bit about what to do with this blog.  When I started this in undergrad I assumed no one would ever read it.  Later, a few friends told me they occasionally looked at.  That was kinda cool.  Lately more and more people have told me they actually read what gets put up here.  Which is honoring and frightening at the same time.  But I still assumed I had fewer readers than fingers.  Just recently blogger added a new feature- a page view counter that shows the number of hits a site receives.  I was stunned to discover that this blog has nearly fourteen-hundred hits since last May (when blogger started counting)!  But spread out over eight months that amounts to be about six a day, which doesn't seem that significant.  Using my super-power abilities as the manager of this page, I was able to see how many of those hits are in the last month.  Its something close to 350, about a quarter of the total hits, bringing last months' average to about twelve hits a day.  Given that I have put up only five posts in the last month (most of them in the last week), I am assuming that these are not the same twelve people every day.  In other words, this blog's readership has been significantly growing recently.

From my perspective as a writer, that changes how I view this a little bit.  I'm not just spitting out my thoughts in stream of conscious blabber that no one ever looks at anymore.  Nor is it just a few close friends and peers who are studying the same material I am with the same intensity who can and will tell me I'm an idiot when I say something stupid or irresponsible.  Many of the people I have received direct comments about this blog from are not studying theology or philosophy for a living.  Which is most certainly not to say they are not capable of understanding what is written here.  But like every field, the farther you get into it the more jargon you become acquainted with that others outside the "guild" don't readily know.  I am fairly certain I am guilty of using a lot of that jargon here in a way that is probably not helpful to those who are not studying the same things I am studying.  Another frequent comment that I have received is that my posts are really long.  Which is definitely true…. And again, probably not helpful or encouraging to readers.

So one thing that I want to do with the new year is to make this blog a little more reader friendly.  Less jargon and shorter posts are the goals, which probably also means more frequent posts.  Feedback is always welcome to let me know how I'm doing with that. 

One other major goal I have for the new year is to get back into the performance of music.  I have decided that I miss that too much.  I have also been a bit disappointed in the local music scene in New Haven.  Birmingham had a fantastic scene of local artists like Wild Sweet Orange, Justin Cross, Matthew Mayfield, etc.   Primarily in New Haven what I have seen is lots of fantastic classical music, which is great.  But there really doesn't seem to be much for folk/rock/acoustic type music, which is what I really love.  So tentatively I want to try and get back into playing that kind of music and find a few venues in New Haven to play at.  So how does this relate to blogging?  I am toying with the idea of starting a Tumbler account to post song lyrics and recordings for feedback and publicity…  Any thoughts?