The four ages of blogging. Or, a few lines of bollocks.

In less than a month this blog will be four years old. I didn’t think, at the time, that it would last four weeks, but it’s passed really quickly. The past few weeks I haven’t had any compulsion to post anything; it’s been a weird time with one thing and another. I sat down this afternoon determined to post something, determined to get back into the swing of it, I failed dismally. I thought that having a look at my archives could possibly give me some inspiration, or maybe a read through the blogroll, in the end I even checked my referrer stats to see what readers were writing about. Nothing ! Not the slightest hint of inspiration, ah well I can always fall back on the Bloggers old faithful….. talk bollocks for a couple of sentences and see what comes out. So here it is, the four ages of blogging.

Year one.
I began with no real plan in mind; I had heard about blogging from a friend and actually started to write mine before I read anyone else’s. I was running blind and, I thought, talking to no one. I had no idea if what I was doing was any good because I had no comments for the first five months. This blind blogging actually affected the way I wrote; I was searching for a voice and maybe trying to please a prospective audience.

Year two.
I had a large blogroll and a few regular readers, I was writing stuff that meant something to me and I was learning a lot from other Bloggers too. I think I became a little more creative and definitely more daring in the way I expressed myself. It’s strange when you know you have an audience. With the introduction of comments I actually had some feedback as well. I was happy in my little corner of the community.

Year three.
This is when the cliques started, in jokes and huge blogrolls were the order of the day. Template changes instead of decent posts, and gimmicks instead of imagination. It all went a bit awry. Some trimming of the blogroll and a long hard look at what I was churning out was needed.

Year four.
More holes than Blackburn Lancashire and when I did post it was just mundane a boring stuff. Mind you, the last twelve months or so has been full of change. That’s no excuse though; you would think with all the stuff going on in my life I would have been prolific. It had the opposite effect, I really couldn’t be arsed. I wrote on here a while back that I would keep Bluetealeaf going even if its rotting corpse was sat stinking in the corner of blogland. I still intend to, but I’m not sure what form it will take.

Well, a few lines of bollocks, but I suppose that could be the strap line for the whole fucking blogging community. That’s all this is ever going to be, and if that’s alright with you I’ll just carry on.

Thanks to all who come here to read, and here’s to the next four years.

Life in a northern town.

Yesterday I took Tracy to a forensics conference at Manchester metropolitan uni’, we gave a lift to one of the younger students at St Martin’s. His friend died in a car crash last week. It must be difficult to come to terms with your own mortality at such a young age. Whilst Tracy was in the conference I visited my dad at Christie's, he’s just had a stem cell transplant and is currently in isolation. He’s past the sickness stage and is getting better. I was walking round Stockport later, thinking about fate, bad luck, call it what you will, but I was pondering why some people make it and some don’t.

One of the things I noticed during my wander around Stockport town centre was the number of cheap book shops; I thought it was a Cumbrian phenomenon. I got “Blue moon rising” for £1.99 to add to my City collection. I used to wag school in Stockport, and I couldn’t believe how much it has changed, for the worse in my opinion. No Victoria café, no co-op, no Spynx’s pie shop and none of that lovely hot weetabix smell from Robbie’s brewery. In fact the only thing that hasn’t changed are the planes flying right down the middle of the Mersey way. It’s characterless and could be any town in the UK.

Tracy’s conference was all about computer crime and how the police can find out what people have been doing by analysing their PC. Shipman was one of the examples used, it’s fascinating stuff. I may well go along to the next one, it’s got to better than wandering around faceless town centres.