All in the Family featured the curmudgeonly Archie Bunker. Archie was television’s most famous grouch, blunt, blustering, straightforward and untouched by the PC crowd. He was the archetype of the conservative male. Michael desprately tried to reeducate him, but he persisted in his breviloquence.



Looking back at the last 40 years, we realize: ARCHIE WAS RIGHT!

11/27/2013

1,000

This is my 1,000th post.

When I started this blog, I had a couple of goals or if not a goal at least an idea bouncing around in the back of my head as to what I wanted to do.

One of those ideas was that based on the other blogs and political writing I had been reading, I decided that it couldn't be that hard to match what others were doing.  I still feel that way, however, I find it hard to care enough about those issues to try.

I suppose another idea I had was that a blog might be a source of cash flow.  I gave up on that idea fairly early on.  Marketing my brain droppings would have taken too much of my time.

Which leads me into another one of my reasons for starting a blog, professional development.  I thought that blogging would be a great way to develop a useful skill that would help round me out as a modern professional.  I suppose I have developed a small skill that might be useful.  There is one tiny problem.  I blog from my political perspective.  I'm not politically correct.  The internet is one place that you can get away with that, at least to a degree.  This means that I chose not to tell anyone from Real Life, about my net persona.  Those of you that know me as Res Ipsa and have met me in real life have an advantage over my real life acquaintances, with the exception of my wife, no one from RL knows about my blogging.  This makes my "net skills" useless since I chose not to point anyone to my blog.

One of my other goals was to polish my writing.  Looking back over this last month I see that I have clearly failed.  It seems I still have several bad habits.  Frustrating Water Boy was never a specific goal for my blogging, however it has become a by product. The fault is mine.  I still like to assume ideas that I haven't presented are linked to things I'm writing about without the inconvenience of developing everything that is pertinent to the topic.  They're is som spel chexer an usege isues that I never mastered in my 5th grade skool dayz.  (Yes all of that was intentional. I know, sometimes you have your doubts).

I wanted to see what would happen to my traffic if I wrote an average of 1 post per day for the year.  This went pretty well for the first few months I tried it.  I doubled and ever tripled my blog traffic.  The biggest problem is that I have kids, home school and work the night shift.  Keeping up with the blogging and producing something marginally worth reading was a lower priority than those other things.  I suspect that I could grow the blog considerably on a two post a day schedule.  As far as that goes, it seems that a post view count of 1,200 to 1,500 is about what is needed to get a decent conversation going in the comments.  Right now, I don't have the desire to put in that kind of effort.  So unless some other curmudgeonly minded writer wants to start guest posting here, I'm going to have to be satisfied with my 100 to 300 visitors a day.

Thank you for dropping by over the years and reading what I have to say.  I intend to keep plugging away at it.

4 comments:

  1. WaterBoy11:17 AM

    Congrats on the milestone! It doesn't seem like you have been doing this that long, but the timeline shows that it's been almost eight years.

    Your writing has gotten better, too, from a grammatical standpoint. I think we lose a lot of the teaching and the writing experience we gained in our school years, unless we can continue to employ those skills throughout our lives. I have written short stories intermittently ever since college, so I've retained most of that knowledge. And when the OC started his Friday Challenge, I was able to continue practicing there more frequently. The more you do this, the better you'll continue to get, too.

    I appreciate what you do, which is providing a forum for discussion. While you know that I don't agree with everything you write -- and really, isn't that a positive feature -- I like that you are willing to present your ideas and discuss them civilly. Too many fora like this grow too large and attract too many commenters who are way too eager to start throwing around insults at each other, rather than restricting them for usage against the frequent trolls.

    So thanks for doing what you do, and I hope you continue for as long as you can stand it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you my friend.

    I drove by your place twice this weekend. My sister lives in NM now and we went down for Thanksgiving. I thought about stopping but the wife and kids needed the trip to be over.

    I hope people don't agree with me. I would rather someone point out ideas that are different than mine or areas were my ideas are week. I appreciate that you do that from time to time.

    ReplyDelete
  3. WaterBoy12:24 PM

    How ironic -- WaterGirl's cousin from Fort Collins went to NM for the holiday also. She did stop in and got a fresh omelet made to order for her reward.

    Tell Mrs. Ipsa that you're stopping somewhere for breakfast/lunch/dinner and drop on by, next time.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you for the offer. That would have worked out on Wednesday.

    ReplyDelete