Pause for thought

I've read enough blogs to recognise the signs. An initial flurry of posts, then a few pauses, then a few more bursts, then a longer pause, followed by a burst, and then just a single post, and then... nothing.

Usually that's it. There are lots of possible explanations: the blog writer has got a new job, or moved on, or something else. Whereas a newspaper column would quickly be replaced, blogs are different. They continue to exist on the Interweb, although that increasingly out-of-date 'last' entry is like a flag that hints at an underlying 'story' or maybe just a simple reason, but no more than that. Like:

http://nancyspoint.com/when-bloggers-stop-blogging/

https://smartblogger.com/mediocre-blogger/

https://www.nomipalony.com/gdpr-for-bloggers/

But sometimes it is different...

(And sometimes it is self-inflicted: https://moz.com/blog/12-things-that-will-kill-your-blog-post-every-time )

Last or Final?

When people post to blogs, the 'latest' post is also the 'last' post - in the sense of the 'last so far'. Irregular postings that don't say 'this is my final post' are always going to be the 'most recent', 'latest', 'last so far', etc. Interestingly, even a 'final' post could be followed by a 'my previous post was not my final one!'. Extrapolating from this, then the concept of a 'death-bed post' is an intriguing one. (Some blog posts start to get close to this topic, for example: https://community.macmillan.org.uk/blogs/b/community_news/posts/guest-post-sorry-i-m-not-in-service )

Gaps analysed partially

There have been quite a few gaps in postings to this blog, and based on this evidence, then my analysis would have been exactly the same as for any other blog. But then, surprise, surprise, there have been some new entries. And more intriguingly, I am now posting an entry that examines what happens when a blog pauses and then restarts. I suspect that this makes this entry doubly rare, and so something really unusual.

The reasons for my gaps are mildly interesting, and faintly unusual (depending on how you measure the degree of unusual-ness), and I won't bore you with them, which isn't meant to trivialise them, merely to downgrade their significance. The world is an intriguing place, and sometimes events impose themselves on you.

Nice conclusion!

So I'm more than happy to say that sometimes, interesting and unlikely things happen. After several  challenging pauses, I'm now going to try and write the occasional blog post again.

Irregularly.


Here.



From me.




To you.





(Yep, reading all that 'New Wave' SF from the 1960s has been a big influence on my use of 'new lines' !)