ON BLOGGING ~ Bumbling Through Another Year...

We just celebrated our second year of blogging on October 5th! My how time has flown - it all just runs together. I couldn't even remember what things we've done in the last year versus our first year. I had to dig around in some stats and old post history to figure it out. Here's a re-cap...

A year ago we were just making the choice to stop participating in the Thursday 13 meme. This was a bold experiment. Some of our biggest traffic came from T13. I had developed a nice friendship with Janet who runs the meme. I first met many of you through T13. Why turn our back on a good thing? Because we're crazy? I dunno. I just wanted to be done with the memes - our own excluded of course. Our numbers never really recovered. But what I did discover is that although we have less visitors than we used to, we have more subscribers than we ever have. Less people visiting, more people staying. And that's what matters to us.

One of the results of not having memes to set your posting schedule is that you need to come up with fresh ideas yourself. One of those ideas was to make Fridays a place to vent about blogging which led to a way to share knowledge about how to cure the frustrations of blogging. The BlogAnon and Blog Tips features get lots of attention from new people every month. Sometimes people share links to these posts and other times new visitors are just naturally drawn to them. Makes sense. I blog. I like to learn about blogging. I like to talk to other people about it to conspire and consult and connect. And so do most other bloggers. Its a natural fit.

This led to a very new idea of installing a place for us bloggers to chat. All together. Live. I'm not sure if the Bumble Town Chats each month will develop into a strong addition to our blog or if it will fizzle out. They will only be as active and rewarding as those participating want them to be. Last month we covered how much time we spend on blogging, how many blogs we follow and why we follow them, whether we write book reviews any differently depending upon the source of the book and shared some of the blogosphere events and communities we frequent. Each month's chat participants will set the topic of discussion for the following month's chat. Our next chat is a book discussion of The Handmaid's Tale. Who knows what we'll decide to do for November.

In addition to getting to know the bloggers that visit us, we like to make sure that bloggers get to know a bit about us too. In the last year we have given Andy a spot to share his various concert reviews. We have shared our passion for all things sports - fantasy or reality. And we have tried to spotlight the things around our town that stand out to us as interesting. What we've learned is that there are some pretty cool places right under our nose that we never would have bothered with if we hadn't decided to devote a blog posting series to them.

We found a new header, lost a beloved cat, gained a beautiful niece and I even read all of War & Peace. That's the variety and roller coaster of life that makes it worth living - and blogging about. Here's to another year of making more friends and maneuvering between the worlds of online and face to face.