Hiatus

I've been on vacation for almost two weeks, which was nice. However, part of that time was spent assessing personal priorities, and it turns out that as much as I like blogging and believe I have something to say, it's at the bottom of the list of personal priorities -- and things which I say I value more than the blog are getting pushed out.

For example, I have a lot of weight to lose; you can't lose weight if you don't exercise, and I only have a fixed number of hours in the day. I also have two children who deserve to have a better Dad than the one who sits in front of that stupid flat screen monitor half the time, and I have a wife who works much harder than the average wife who deserves not to have to work that hard -- she deserves to have a better husband than I am.

There are also the issues of whether I am doing in real life what I blog so passionately about here, and again there being only so many hours in the day, you get the idea. What about my church? What about that trailer park? What about my pastor? What about the Gospel and lost people?

So that all said, thanks to you loyal readers. Keep your powder dry. booyah.

[$] Free Blog Advice

Listen -- I may not be the hottest ticket in blogging, but I'm in the top 10% of all bloggers in the TTLB ecosystem no matter how you slice it, so I must be doing something right, right?

So I have this small morsel of advice for anyone striving to write a blog that's not in the dregs of the blogosphere. It's not much advice, and it's not really theopneustos if you see what I'm saying, but it is a valuable piece of advice:

If you ever feel motivated to write a blog entry with the subject "This is where I am Right Now" (or words to that effect), stop what you are doing and get a job or something, OK? Get a hobby.

To put this into perspective, as I post this entry, technorati says there are roughly 18.5 million active blogs with a network of over 1.5 billion links in the blogosphere. Think about that -- 1.5 billion links. Now, of all those blogs and all those links, how many of those people do you know personally? If we count all the people who would recognize your from church and all the people who would recognize you as a person they go to school/work with, I'll bet we could say that about 1,000 people "know" you. Now if all of them have an active blog, that means that 0.005% of all bloggers know who you are -- about one in every 20,000 bloggers. That's not very many.

And of that number, I'll bet not 5 of them thought to themselves today, "Hmmm. I wonder where [your nAme] is right now?" So the information in a blog post with the subject "This is where I am Right Now" (or words to that effect) is a post that nobody really wants to read.

We don't care.

That's not cruel or calloused: that's life. We don't care where you are right now -- unless you're hurt and you're in need of help and somehow the only way you can call for help is via T1 line because the phone is broke or underwater or something. And if you're needing help, "This is where I am Right Now" (or words to that effect) is an ineffective title. "I'M BLEEDING" or "THE WATER'S GETTING HIGHER" or "911! I NEED HELP RIGHT NOW!" is a lot more likely to draw attention than "This is where I am Right Now" (or words to that effect).

Get yourself together. Just because you can blog doesn't mean you must blog. Maybe you just don't have anything to say -- and that's fine. It's not a sin to be silent -- in fact, it is a virtue to be silent when you ought to be silent (cf. Prov 12:23).

Try it out. It might work for you.