I started with blogspot while friends from stumbleupon schooled me on HTML. I copied everything onto Wordpress which automatically duplicated my posts to Tumblr. It was fun. Stumbleupon was my favorite platform. Besides having a diverse and international crowd, there was a chat, a forum, and even a music player so that stumblers may play your customized playlist while perusing your blog. And then the format was changed. Everyone was told to copy and migrate their blogs to somewhere different. And stumbleupon became an ugly version of Pinterest. The end of an era came.
We had personalized our blogs and taught coding to each other. We complimented and reached out when someone did something really cool to their blog. One particular stumbler took my profile pic and gave it a literal twist.
It was his unique way of saying hello. He did something special to everyone's profile photo that he was following.
It was a bloody day when our blogs were killed off. We now gather in a Facebook private group to reminisce the good ole blogging days.
Can you imagine steemit calling it quits, telling you that your blog and posts as you know it will be snuffed out of existence? I am happy to find a community here on Steemit. I'm slowly making friends. Hello, hello, sweet people!
The blockchain has a permanence that I appreciate. Steemit is alive and kicking yet there seems to be a cemetery of dead blogs. It is a sad thing to see a forsaken or forgotten blog. It's like seeing a discarded diary.
I recently went through my friend's follower list. It was only 30 people. Of the 30, only 3 were active; myself included. She said she only does a follow for follow exchange. I'm not sure about the advantages of following bots or re-steemers. Those accounts tend to run out of inspiration and their reputation scores backpedal from the gifted 25. I saw one today whose reputation score had plummeted to NEGATIVE FOUR!
Is your blog doomed to expire and join the dead? Not if your blog sparks joy. Would you re-read your own posts? If you get some pleasure in revisiting an old post, you will endure. You are your most important follower.
Having browsed through a multitude of blogs, it's become a game that I predict if a blog is dead before it fully loads. Some blog names seem to invite it's suicidal death. Other blogs were created for too narrow a niche that the subject eventually suffocated its writer out of the game. Everything is memorialized on the blockchain but it doesn't need to be a permanent death.
Maybe don't throw away your blog, maybe Marie Kondo your mindset. Make modifications. Fold your words and photos differently in an organized and uniform manner that makes it easy to visit, re-visit, and play with your blog. Wear it and rock it like a favorite hat.
Just some thoughts. I hope your blog sparks joy.
JNET
