Kent

I think I can now empathize with those who were on Radio, or other early blog engines. I started blogging (upon the Spider King's instruction) back in 2003. Hardly early. My first bloggings were using a custom "system" that I had written -- I would generate the RSS, then FTP that to my server. The blog software (essentially in reverse of many engines) would render that RSS as HTML. Later, I started up on ScottW's fledgling dotnetweblogs.com. I *think* I had a little to do with its later becoming weblogs.asp.net, but that may just be my delusions of grandeur speaking.

Finally, after being forced over to a new URL I didn't really want, I decided it was time to head out on my own again. I grabbed a copy of Telligent's fine Community Server, installed it at a host, and here I am. Sadly, I don't seem to be as here as I hoped. Despite my telling people I moved, people still seem to only read the original. Examples: there are currently 10 subscriptions to my new blog (this one) on Bloglines, while there are 189 to the old one. 189 people, some maybe even complaining about how I haven't posted since March of this year. The depressing event happened last weekend, though. I did a test -- I posted to this blog on Friday at the end of a long day/week. Then, I started to watch as no one read it. Well, hardly any (Hi Brian, Hi Karl, Hi Scott, Hi Mike). Finally, Brian read the post, and announced the same item on his blog. Boom, responses a plenty. I decided to try part 2 of the test this morning - post the same item to both blogs. Currently (about 10 hours after the original post) 573 people have read the post, either via the post itself, or via an aggregator (maybe more, but that's what the feedback page is reporting). Oh, that's via the "old blog". Via the new blog that same set of numbers is 63. Pretty much an order of magnitude lower.

So, what do I do? Move back to the old blog? Ignore it and move on with my life as this is incredibly trivial? Blog about more technical stuff (that I have no time to do as I spend all my workday beating down MSDN bugs on the four sites I get to work on)? Leak internal documents? Go back to playing WoW? Work on the book chapters I have to get done? Make popcorn? Oh, OK, I'll go do that. Later.