Three Year Anniversary

At the beginning of January, I was editing my Featured Posts of the month and I noticed that I ran across my very first post which was posted on January 30, 2006. I feel this blog has come along way and I do think I’ve made mistakes, but overall I like where my blog is right now and am looking forward to the next year.

Among my many mistakes I think maybe one of my bigger mistakes traffic-wise was my choice to move away from WordPress hosting. Originally, this blog was on wordpress. I had bought the option to add my own personal domain, but then decided to move off to my own hosting so that I could have my own advertising (which I hear why many use blogspot but I’ve never liked blogspot’s interface compared to wordpress).

I don’t think this was a huge deal in retrospect, I like the incoming revenue, but it has never really made me a dime, I have lost more money and have yet to get a check from any of my advertisers, which I guess is fine. It was more about the hope anyway. I do think that the best thing I got out of the move away was the ability to have my own themes, designs, and plugins all of which I love greatly. The thing I haven’t liked about the move is the free advertising. I got a lot of random visitors just from being hosted on wordpress.

The funny thing about my blog and how blogs are suppose to be compared to how mine is. I recently read an article about common new blogger mistakes. And the one that I still commit even two years later is that I don’t stick with my niche at all. Especially if you consider this blog was originally supposed to be about Hepatitis C and Hemophilia. If you gave this blog a niche, it would probably be games and game design. But I talk about all sorts of things, I just talk about those two the most and that is largely because that is what I think about the most.

The way that my brain thinks about stuff is not to think about one thing all the time, I think about many things and so that is how this blog has been. It hasn’t been about a niche, it has been a blog about my train of thought. And while that may in fact hamper the overall growth of this blog because of the lack of focus, I think if it focused on only one thing, it would likely suffer from the fact that some months I would only post 1 or 2 posts a month because I’m just not thinking about it so I have nothing to say.

When I say stuff here, I have always said what was on my mind. I wasn’t just saying it for the sake of saying it. Which I don’t know about anyone who actually reads this, but I think this is the most important thing regardless. I personally would rather read things that were honest and sincere and not just shelled in because I have to. But maybe that is just me.