How to Neglect a Blog

Courtesy of neglectful blogger par-excellance minifig.

Neglecting your blog is not as easy as it may seem. When one looks across the net, a lot of the most popular blogs have clearly not been neglected in a long time. Here are some useful pointers on how to neglect a blog.

1. The tools available to you allow you to neglect your blog in a lot more ways than you’ve ever been able to previously. For example, with the ability to post via email, or even just using your phone and the WordPress iPhone app, you are now able to neglect your blog from anywhere where there’s a net connection, or mobile coverage. You can be out and about, see something interesting, and fail to blog it RIGHT THERE AND THEN. This is progress.
2. A useful, and mildly ironic way you can neglect your blog, is through the process of finding something to blog about. “But how can this be possible?!” I hear you weep, through clenched teeth. Well, my friends, with the power of Google Reader, this is more possible than ever. Using Google Reader, you can now ensure that every time someone bleats on Digg about the fact they don’t like the new Last.fm design, you hear about it right away. Or, if you’re really using Google Reader properly, you’ll hear about it a week or so later when you’re desperately trying to catch up on all the feeds that you haven’t read and are making you feel guilty. Google Reader also provides you the chance to Star or Share items you have some vague idea that in the future you’d like to blog about. If this blog post ever happens, which it won’t, it will be so long after the fact that they internet has moved on, and you’ll have to start every post with ‘I know I’m late to this, but…’
3. Once you’ve been blogging for more than a few months you’ll come to realise something very important about yourself. You may think that you’re never going to learn anything important when you’re blogging, but you’re wrong. You’ll learn very shortly that you only really have about 5-7 opinions. You’ll exhaust these in the first few weeks, and as time goes by, you’ll realise that there’s no point in writing that post. You might, for example be holding your head in your hands while blood drips down your face, because every time you hear someone whinge about how they liked the old last.fm design more than the new one you feel the need to charge headfirst into the nearest stationary object. But you think, that’s essentially the same post I wrote when everyone was whinging about how they liked the old Digg design, or the old BBC News design. Face it, you really don’t have as many opinions as you thought you did. You may lament humanity’s inability to adapt even the tiniest bit yet more than you did a month ago, but you’ve still used all your ‘funniest’ metaphors.
4. When you started blogging, you weren’t going to be a stats whore, were you? You were writing your blog for your own benefit, right? And if people enjoyed what you did, then great, but that wasn’t why you started. You didn’t need to be popular. You didn’t need 500 people commenting on all your posts. You never wanted that Boing Boing link anyway. Doctorow’s too busy telling you about how Little Brother has now been translated into Klingon by kittens to notice you. But seven people read that 1000 word essay on how stupid people on last.fm are. Seven. And six of them spent less than 10 seconds on the page, and the seventh was searching for ‘idiot blood website whore’ on Google and probably didn’t find quite what he was looking for. I mean, being underground’s great and everything, but really you wanted the counter-cultural form of being underground, rather than the being dead kind.
5. Sometimes you have a great idea for a list-based blog post, but you just can’t make it into a round number. Four Reasons Why Last.Fm Users are Self-Centred, Stone-Age, Change-Fearing Morons is never going to get you on the front page of Digg is it? Digg users only go to web pages where their insane, westernised complaints about nothing can be made into a numbered list which is divisable by 5 (presumably so they can use their chubby, salt-encrusted fingers to help them count along). 4, 8, 17. These are numbers that will not help you find out how bad your web host is at dealing with insane amounts of traffic for a couple of hours.

I do hope that this post makes you realise that neglecting your blog doesn’t have to be the chore you’re becoming to believe that it is. Using these tips, we can all neglect our blogs with gay abandon, and feel at the core of our beings the guilt and loss of self-worth that this brings.