… for a while, at least.

This blog is built on WordPress, and every day since June 12, 2005, I’ve posted something here. That amounts to three or four halfway-decent blog posts and a lot of crap, but it also adds up to a lot of time spent posting here.

On most days, when the tubes of the interwebs aren’t experiencing extreme sclerosis, posting something here generally takes just a few minutes. Lately though, something’s been happening at my site host where that thing that should take a few minutes takes nearly an hour. The issue has been happening on and off for nearly a year — every few months, the blog becomes inaccessible for several weeks. I can’t afford to keep wasting the time it takes to deal with the hosting company to straighten it out, and I can’t afford to spend an hour making a blog post that ought to take five minutes.

In the grand scheme of things, this blog is a tiny grain of sand on a giant beach. I don’t get a whole lot of traffic. But I do like the idea of blogging daily: There’s a structure and a discipline involved that I like, and knowing that I need to post something each day is a good incentive to check my news feeds and keep on top of developments in the worlds of UX, SEO, PR and a whole bunch of other acronyms.

The miniscule audience I have probably won’t notice I’m gone, but my daily routine will have changed significantly in a way that will fundamentally feel like a tiny step toward worse. I’m not crazy about that. I want to take steps toward things being better, not worse, but this latest iteration of this issue has gone on too long to deal with anymore. Time isn’t just money, it’s time I could be spending doing an infinite number of other things.

Maybe this issue will straighten out at some point in the near future. Maybe not. Until it does, though, I need to focus my time and energy elsewhere. As is said in the circus: See you down the road.

I’m not quite sure why they felt it had to be done as an infographic, but Social Times has posted a pretty cool list of 12 weird social networks.

“So, I learn from my mistakes. It’s a very painful way to learn, but without pain, the old saying is, there’s no gain. I found that to be true in my life. You miss a lot of opportunities by making mistakes, but that’s part of it: knowing that you’re not shut out forever, and that there’s a goal you still can reach.”
—Johnny Cash

Graduation isn’t too far away for a lot of college students. If I were speaking to the Ben Braddocks of today, I’d have one thing to say to them: “3D Printing.” Here’s a good reason why.

This is the most ridiculous YouTube compilation I’ve ever seen: 10 Marx Bros. trailers. Odds are you’ll want to find the time to go watch three or four of these movies in full.

That’s what a Yahoo! supervisor told an angry T-Mobile customer when he complained of receiving 50-60 SMS messages a day from them. Wrong answer — one that could cost Yahoo! $2.35 million in fines. MediaPost reports.

Young people (18-29) use social media a lot more than older people (65 and up). No duh. Other than that, pretty much two-thirds of us use social media regardless of household income, education level and some other stiff. All Twitter has the infographic.

Search Engine Journal has posted 6 Pillars of a Successful Blog. It’s a pretty good read. LOHAD observes one of them. Maybe. It really boils down to a matter of personal taste.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this blog and whether to keep it going or not. It’s not a blog that gets a lot of traffic or comments, it tends to be an inconvenience to make posts, the back-end software often makes a 5-minute task take a half hour or more … what’s the point?

Well, the point I keep coming back to is the point I started with so many moons and a coupla thousand posts ago: I’m not blogging for anyone other than myself. I’m not trying to turn myself into the next Chris Brogan. I’m not trying to hustle new business. I’m not trying to get into the “thought leader” game. If you like some of the stuff you see here, cool. If not, no biggie — there are 147 bazillion other blogs out there.

So why bother? I like the structure of it. I like the daily routine and the fact that posting once a day every day is a kick in the ass to check the worlds of marketing, advertising, SEO, technology and social media to see what’s going on. It’s something that prevents me from looking up one day and saying, “Crap! I’ve been so busy playing Mafia Wars I haven’t paid any attention to what’s going on in the world of online marketing!”

Of course, many days there’s not a whole hell of a lot going on, anyway. Ya gotta love those days, when all the tech and social media blogs have to report is something like Facebook changing the hex color of some background element somewhere — and, inevitably, 20 minutes later there are 19 white papers out there about “How You Can Use the Facebook  Hex Color Change to Super-Charge Your Lead Generation.”

So … yeah, I’m not in that race. I’m just trying to keep an eye on what’s goin’ on in the bigger picture, the stuff that’s likely to matter in the longer run. (Which is why i’m so intrigued by 3D printing; that’s a game-changer right there.) So I guess I’ll keep on keepin’ on and posting once a day, every day.

At least those videos on Wednesdays and quotes on Fridays make the whole process a little easier.

… you might want to check out this post about some recent Facebook upgrades that could affect you.

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
—Douglas Adams