rant

Today I shall “blog about blogging” like 12,000,000 other blogs because I feel the need to stand out and be unique. The difference is, I don’t want to make money at it, and I don’t want to increase my page rank, and I don’t really give a flying toss what those guys who wrote about this yesterday thought, and I’m sure as hell not going to link to all of them to prove that I agree with them.

I read a lot of blogs, my reader is broken down into four different categories, stuff I read every day, gaming, knitting, and oh look a new one. (yes those are the categories, I’m like this all the time) That last one has a bunch of stuff in it, some good, some crap, and some of them, I honestly don’t remember why I thought I wanted to check back there. If they entertain me for a few weeks, they get shifted into one of the other categories and maybe if I like them a lot, and read them every day, they’ll get to the blogroll on my site. Here’s the catch, I like reading about real people and what they do. Do they make me laugh or think about things? Do they strike me as being sincere and dedicated to whatever topic they write about? Those are the people I want to find, and likewise, those are the type of blogs that make it to my site links.

I started blogging about ten years ago, I ran across some sites while I was playing on some role playing boards, and I got hooked. Back then Wanderlust was the big thing, a random site link that would take you from blog to blog in no order. You couldn’t fine tune it the way you can with Stumble, but that wasn’t the point. It opened a whole world of people up to readers and writers. Most of the blogs then were personal, more online diaries than informational sites. Granted there were still specialty sites that dealt with particular topics and such, but everyone did it because it was fun, and there was a feeling of sharing things. I was never in the “A” group, but I was a good solid “C+” with about 1000=1500 visitors a day. I had issues with someone local and it bled into the online world and rather than feed a psychotic troll who knew where I lived, I shut everything down.

I also walked away from writing, blogging, hanging out with online friends and sunk into my gaming habit and getting on with life. The writing bug kicked back in seriously around October of last year, and I set up this domain. I kicked things off with NaBloPoMo and kept going from there. I started reading and catching up with sites and people that I had missed, and I also realized that there was more shitty regurgitated link whoring dreck than I could have ever imagined. Honestly people, if I decided to set up a blog and got WordPress working on my space, don’t you think I may be smart enough to figure out what the “best wordpress plugins” are? Considering there are around 3,900,000 results for that, I guess not. The problem then is, 3,899,993 of you are linking to the same fucking posts that 7 people did the research on and pointed out what would work best for them. HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!!

Now the whole reason for this long winded spew is that there is a bitchfest going on among the Irish blogs because those that won are trying to be like “American Bloggers,” but they’ll “Never be that good” so why keep trying? Who the fuck are you idiots and why the hell would any of the brilliant original and talented people that I have come to read daily, want to strive to be a pile of steaming swill that is the furthest thing from what they are now that there is no comparison? I remember these same pissing whines from sites here when the blog awards were new, and I say the same thing now that I did then. Get over yourself and improve. If no one reads you, it’s probably because you’re not worth the effort to click the link.

I should probably apologise to the 30 people that read this site, I know you’ve all heard this one before but I couldn’t help it. It’s taken me months to find the 20-30 sites that I read religiously, and I can’t imagine a day without those people. They make me smile, laugh and cry, sometimes all at the same time. I don’t really care if they put ads on their sites, or even if they do paid posts on occasion, because all of them write what they feel and what they know. They’re not trying to be like everyone else, they’re just being who they are and we are lucky that they are willing to share it with the rest of us.

For those of you who pay attention, you might notice that this entire rant contains no links, not even to the “good stuff.” That’s intentional, I don’t care. I check my stats once a week, to make sure that everything is in order and no one is linking my dog’s picture to a kitty pron site. That’s about it. I did check my page rank once, because I was curious. It was a 4, whatever the hell that means in terms of greatness. I think it means I have some pointed edges and I’m a even number. I’m also thinking of redesigning the site, so it may go up in smoke this week, who knows.