With the Works

Archive for August, 2008

I suggested to a friend that she should consider blogging as a way to keep her mind active. She has been suffering from “visual vestibular mismatch” since the fall of 2006. This disorder results in extreme dizziness, loss of balance, and mental confusion. It makes working impossible.

So, desperate to keep her mind busy, she took my suggestion and began a blog. Within 2 days she had transferred everything that was on the news page of her website into her blog and was adding a new post each day. Then she asked me to add a widget to track blog stats so she would know if anyone was reading it. I installed Wassup and within a few weeks she started building up a large readership.

Now she is feeling a lot of self-imposed pressure to write something every day. Given her illness, this is a huge undertaking for her. So far she has managed, but it isn’t easy. Some days it takes her 10 hours to complete the task. Before she got ill, she would have been able to write the same post in an hour or less! Writing a daily blog post has proven to her that she isn’t ready for even a limited return to work.

It’s been an interesting experiment. Without the Wassup stats she was happy to write something that was interesting to her, but after seeing which of her posts get the most readers, she now trys to write posts that are of interest to her readers. I would not inflict that kind of pressure on myself-I write blog posts because I want to write about something that interests me.