From Hobby To Passion

2009-06-29

Its been a great Sunday today. My day started of with a great victory in a cricket match in which my team participated. The surprise was that I played a match winning knock today. Few shots which I played surprised the opponents which includes Kevin Peterson's Switch Hit(or) Shot. I received great appreciation from both my team members and opponents. But I fear this could be my last innings this year as I broke one of my fingers while taking a catch. One of my right hand fingers now appears to be bended(or) tilted at an angle of 30 degrees.

So its been one and half months since I started blogging. When I started blogging I felt like I was standing at the centre of an ocean and searching for the shore. I got this strange feeling because I didn't have a single person to guide me and none of my friends used to blog,So my network was zero. There were times when I just used to write a post and sit back the whole day checking whether anyone would comment. I was also a little bit scared of receiving negative or criticising comments. A criticism would really  put down the energy of a rookie. Then I started exploring for widgets as my next step. Discovered some great widgets,added them to my blog. I added the Hit Counter for the first time and was anxious to see whether my counter goes up or not. I used to reload the page often and see whether my counter has gone up by at least one  point. And slowly it started increasing.
When I started blogging, I was zero in expressing my thoughts. Giving shape to thoughts and imaginations are the most difficult things for me. Days passed as I wasted most of my time thinking and analyzing about the contents.I never knew what to write and ended up writing some posts on my subject electrical engineering with some basic diagrams. Suddenly there was a great surprise,the counter started ticking at a faster rate. Next I added the Cluster map widget. After installing this gadget the counter craze was over.Now I started longing for a tiny red mark to appear on the map. I felt like there was no improvement in my blogging skills and felt like giving up. There were 0 followers, no comments. I wondered why no one is commenting. There was not even piece of encouragement nor criticism. Why the hell am i writing blogs?
Then I started searching for other blogs and wanted to compare my standards with those blogs. Most of the blogs had a large network with large number of comments. Wlarge_PS2002~Passion-Postershen I was surfing through one of the blogs I found one badge “MEMBER OF INDIBLOGGER”. That was the time I realised that there are various communities for bloggers. I registered myself for Indiblogger and became a member too. I received both positive and negative reviews from INDIBLOGGER’s renowned members. I started exploring various blogs,read lots of contents.learnt how people expressed themselves. What are all the contents about which people are writing.
I learnt about editing templates,took my high school HTML book back from shelves and started reloading what ever I read in High School. I joined various other communities,Learnt some blogging tricks and posted about it in this blog.  Started writing comments in others blog, started writing in the forum of Indiblogger,reviewed various sites and asked back for reviews.
Then one fine day I saw many read spots on my cluster maps. There were Visitors from US,UK,Canada etc. Comments started pouring. All of a sudden my energy boosted and blogging which I actually started for passing my time turned into a hobby and now became a passion.
Still I am not saying I am an expert blogger and express my thoughts well. But there has been a considerable improvement in my writing skills.
I have created some menu’s in my blog design. Shifted my labels,Blog rolls to menus. And also attached a feedback form, after going through various hacks from fellow bloggers.
After one and half months these are few notable small achievements of my blog:
I got a page rank of 1/10
Ranking 72 in Indiblogger
Got a rating of 7.8 from Blogged
My blog is one of the top50 blogs in Web2rank.
Now I am heading towards 500 hits in my counter.
But there has been a small difference of opinion between myself and My brother. He is a great techie. Always learn new things in management,marine etc..etc.. he has a blog in which he writes about various unknown,unbelievable facts. But I prefer writing my personal things and I always wanted to give shape to my own Imaginations. He always asks me what's the use in writing these blogs? What are you going to gain from writing blogs? I have no other answer to say to him except Self-Satisfaction.
Image Courtesy:Google.com

7 comments:

  • Bharathi

    You are absolutely right. Unless we have someone to read, we wouldn't be interested to write. I do the same thing what you said you did (reloading to check if there is any comments or page views etc). I started blogging since one month and I have only three followers. I get very few comments. I got around 1000 page views in one month (I dont know if this is OK). Let me check how it goes.

  • Unknown

    Bharathi that was great..1000 page views in one and half months..I got only 500 in the same period...

  • pRiYaN...!

    dis post is all abt my own experience wen i started blogging....



    -bluffmaster


    www.gr8bluffmaster.blogspot.com

  • Unknown

    @priyan This is true for every new comer without any network

  • Lavanya

    Hey shankar your blog is very nice to read.. good work.. keep it up.. i definitely wish you have more posts coming in for me to read and comment :-)

  • Unknown

    @lavanya: I have some free time in upcoming month lavanya..hope I can satisfy all my readers...And really sorry if i fail to do so...

  • Madman

    I was bogged down at the firs i started a blog just to see 0 comments. Later i realized that I cant worry about something beyond me. I did what i did best i started writing and was reading others blogs and commenting in them, because i like comment, in the end that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

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