social networking (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

It’s been quite a while since I last appeared here, put my fingertips to the beaten and battered keyboard and allowed my thoughts to manifest. In gaming terms I guess you could say that ‘rage quit’ from the world of blogging over the past few months, and hid myself within the real world of books, gaming, daily life, children, chores, Christmas and strangely enough, crocheting. I owe you an explanation for my sudden disappearance – without a word I left you all (well…those of you that are still following me) and so here are a few things worth noting, which will hopefully explain a few things.

Going self-hosted

While it was an easy process and not overly expensive, my financial situation is one where even the small change, has to be taken into account. I simply couldn’t afford the upkeep of a  self-hosted blog, therefore along with my blogging hiatus, I made the switch back to wordpress.com.

The commercialism of blogging

When I began blogging, I did so with gusto, throwing myself into it head-first, without doing much research. Along the way I got side-tracked by people who used their blog as a source of income and freebies – things such as: product reviews, sponsored posts, advertorials and other advertising. Given that money is pretty scarce right now, I thought that it would be a great idea to tap into this source of income. What I didn’t realise was how time consuming it was, how easy it was to fall prey to the allure of extra pocket-money and the odd free product. More importantly my writing suffered as a consequence. I spent so much time seeking out contacts and writing about reviews or services, that I had no enthusiasm to write about the things that I truly wished to write about.

Social networking

By the time I quit, I think I’d signed up with nearly all of the social networking sites out there. Twitter being the worst for it’s addictiveness, was something that I found myself using every hour of the day, if not more. I spent so much time trying to promote my blog, that again, I was left with less time to actually write. Not only that, but my home life was suffering – I was ignoring house-work, avoiding going out, not playing with my children. It was all so wrong that it’s actually quite hard to talk about. My hobby turned into a chore, once that was taking over my life, with little fun left in it.

So I quit. I didn’t tell anyone. I removed myself from social networks, unsubscribed from most of the blogs I’d been following and deleted my account with my hosting company. I lost all of the posts I’d written since going self-hosted, when I moved back to wordpress.com, because I completely forgot to export my content and I’m pretty sure I lost most of my followers too. In a way I’m not phased by this. The things I’d written about when I switched over, weren’t worth reading in my opinion – they were just poorly written updates to bring in an audience, with no heart in them.

So what now? Now I write. I’ll write when I want to, about the things that matter to me. The only social network I’m still on is Facebook and I won’t be publicising aside from on there. I want to continue the story about Big Bro’s journey through hospital – something which got side-tracked, so I will be focusing on that for a while and I hope that by doing so, you, the few readers who I have left who have loyally kept popping in now and then, will appreciate it. Thank you for staying.

I wish you all a Happy New Year and hope that 2013 is an excellent one for everyone.