Longevity In Blogging

Most of my life, I have been a quite ardent disciple of the virtue of longevity, which proclivity has extended beyond things which can be felt or touched.  It has transcended to things that I do like write or collect stuff.

I have had my blog site at the nascent time when blogging was just exploding in numbers and kind in the Internet.  When most anybody who was somebody in the social, political, and business and finance firmaments felt the need to  start one for their adherents to worship in.  And indeed, overnight the numbers exploded into the millions and filled every corner in the Internet.

My blog whose title has without permission co-opted the name of somebody quite famous and influential in the religious realm.  It is called, The Ignatian Perspective, and has been in existence since May of 2004.  To this day, it has been visited by almost half a million viewers, about 430,000 of them.

It has accumulated over 546 entries.  Depending on the subject discussed readership of each entry has wildly fluctuated, from many thousands to less than 50. One entry gathered a total of about 20,000 readers and over 300 comments, and was about the Neri Genealogy.

Conventional wisdom and maybe the human inclination to want to have more readers would dictate that one writes about things that your readers would like to read.

But is that the overriding intent here?  I once tried to find out by experiment what the effect would be if I tried that route.

There was breaking news in the US city where we were residing.  An older American guy was found dead by apparent suicide, jumping from a second-storey hotel window.  He had lived in the Philippines and had married an aging but very popular Filipino actress.  The American had left the country with the pending case against him for the murder of the wife.

The blog entry was simply a first-person eye-witness account of the place where the suicide happened.  Almost instantly, readership spiked to a couple of thousands.  And it felt good while it lasted.

Unfortunately, the intent of the blog was for an entirely different purpose.

I had simply wanted to have a permanent but easy-access medium to translate my thoughts to written form, to record for posterity.  With the silent hope that somehow when I am gone those who will remain could find the time to pore over the entries I had painstakingly created over the many years in existence.

 One self-serving but salutary purpose for this was also the earnest desire to improve my writing by constant practice.  For truly, as one writes more and more, one can sense the developing ease and improvement on the innumerable  ways writing can be done and imparted.