don't expect as much posting this year

Last year, in the midst of all the health problems, I was doing something of an experiment, trying to see whether it was worthwhile to schedule a bunch of posts well ahead of time. This was partly an effort to give me more free time during the week and to reduce the stress coming from the pressure of blogging constantly, and what I came to realize is that, by schedule-posting, I'm really not saving myself much time at all, if any, and I'm certainly not saving myself any stress. The only way to reduce the stress is to fight the compulsion to publish just anything and to put posts out the way I used to, i.e., when I had something to say.

Admittedly, even when I operated on that schedule, I was still putting out at least three posts a day. Well, with all this "free" time coming up now that I'm done with my contract, it's more imperative than ever for me to cut back on my blogging so I can work on projects. I'm also going to be making the move—finally—to SquareSpace, where I can more easily monetize content. I don't think SquareSpace is a free-speech zone, though, so the nature of my own content will have to change since, even here at Blogspot, oversensitive people will call attention to your political views if they don't like what you're saying or the tone in which you say it. (Most often, when I'm informed that a post has been pulled or put behind a warning, it's because of something I reposted from somewhere else. Occasionally, I'm dinged for my own original content, but in most cases, it's stuff I'm passing along.)

So I expect my readership to drop off, maybe even sinking below my old average of about 600 unique visits per day (half of which are bots, of course, and for the month of December, I was averaging 1500-1600 visits per day). I'll still be putting up videos and memes that I think are worth passing along, but this won't be nearly as frequent. The irony of trying to save time by schedule-posting is that I lose my weekends: I spend all weekend writing the posts up, and if for some reason I can't get them finished over the weekend, I end up schedule-posting during the week. The whole thing starts to feel a bit pointless.

We'll see how the bots and readers respond to my new posting pattern, which probably won't look that different from the old pattern. But astute readers ought to see an uptick in original content and not merely appended commentaries on video posts (when I bother to leave any commentary at all).