Wherein I Get All Meta About Blogging. Again.

I haven't been posting much, lately, on either of my blogs.  Depression has this nasty habit of sneaking up and nomming on my ability to motivate myself and get shit done, and this past week has been bad for that.

But on a whim, since my ability to focus and work seems to be coming back today, I posted something to Witch.Words, and then meandered over to check my Analytics for W.W.  I was bracing myself for low statistics, and rightfully so; you can expect visitor stats to remain high if you blog about timeless topics, like personal development or spiritual paths or whatever, the kind of things for which people will always be searching anew, but if you blog on current events and cultural issues, it's an up-to-the-minute thing, and if your content goes stale, so does your visitor count.

Hmm.  I may have just broken some kind of regulation on the number of parenthetical clauses one may have in a single sentence. My apologies.

Anyway.  I got on my Analytics, and looked, and sure enough, it had fallen to a low but steady spot.  I moused over the graph to see the exact visit count per day, though, and guess what?  I was consistently in double-digits, even when I hadn't posted for a full week and then some!  Not by much, it was all in the teens, but still!  And then I clicked to the absolute unique visitor count, and saw that the number was 434 - and mind you, that's only counting from after the template change, because when I changed the template I had to reinstall my tracker code, and that reset my count.  So in the past, what, month or two?  I've had 434 people visit my site.  434 people have read my words. 

Frankly, that both delights me, and scares the shit out of me!  To put it in perspective, how would I do if I were faced with a crowd of 434 people gathered to hear me speak?  I'd be fucking terrified.  I've taken public speaking, and I've been told I have a knack for it, but ye gods, 434 people at once?  Guh.  Wouldn't happen. 

So it's a sobering reminder of the power of the internet, that one young college student, one woman on her laptop in her studio apartment with a big damn mouth and some strident opinions, can carve out the kind of niche that garners at least a dozen visitors every day, and which has reached literally hundreds of people.  Damn.

So. Blogging.

I've written 4 posts over on Witch.Words tonight.  Two published immediately - well, one by accident, I was going to schedule it for tomorrow night but forgot and just hit "publish" instead - and two scheduled for tomorrow morning.  I feel so productive!  I'm all caught up from the week of midterms, and it feels fantastic.

Why is it blogging does this for me?  I'm not sure.  I learn so much with every post, because I try to be really conscientious about including citations and links and stuff, which means I often do a lot more research than I originally thought a topic would require.  For instance, tonight I learned that CPAC stands for Conservative Political Action Conference, because I needed to know if I should write about "CPAC" or "the CPAC conference".  I know my writing has gotten better over time, too. 

I think, though, that concrete benefits like better writing and more knowledge aside - as valuable as they are - what I love so much is that I feel useful.  This may sound presumptuous, but I truly believe my life's purpose is somewhere to be found in activism.  I am supposed to be working to make the world a better place in this particular way.  I don't know if blogging is where I will stay or where my greatest impact will be made, but for right now, it's a step in the right direction.  And who doesn't feel good when they're exercising what they feel to be their soul's purpose for this incarnation?