I’ve been struggling with a little bit of writer’s block for some time now. It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about - it’s just that I’ve been so overwhelmed with things happening in my life the last few months and the things I want to get done that writing entries to my blog has slowly made it’s way to the bottom of the to-do list.

Tonight I was just doing some reading and realized that I missed the one year birthday of Unfolding Neurons! May 13, 2006 was when I wrote my first article entitled “First Post” - I know, creative isn’t it? Back then Unfolding Neurons was known as ‘Yet another Ramble’, and was just an experiment trying out the new blogging software I came across called WordPress. In the past year I’ve grown to really love WordPress. I experimented with different themes, finally went out and got my own domain name (changing Yet Another Ramble to Unfolding Neurons in the process), created a new website to host the sermons that I preach at my church (using WordPress of course), redid my church website to use WordPress, created a family blog using WordPress, learned a lot of PHP and MySql and strengthened my knowledge of .css and html/x-html, designed a couple themes (not publicly released…too embarrassing), and released a WordPress plugin I wrote for organizing series of articles.

Even though I’m still relatively new to the blogosphere (I’ve been blogging since May 2006 - see my first post!) I have been journaling off and on for quite a few years and blogging and journaling share some similarities in terms of what gives lasting power. Of course, there are pretty significant differences between the two (the primary one being the “public” and journalistic feel of a blog vs. the private and diary feel of a personal journal) but for the purpose of this article I think I can write out of some modicum of experience! Another reason that contributes to a measure of insight found in this article is the fact that even though I haven’t blogged myself until recently, I’ve been an avid reader of other peoples blogs for quite a while - there’s certain things that are common among bloggers with lasting power that stick out to me.
Anyway, the purpose of this article is to answer the question, “What are characteristics that keep someone blogging for the long haul?” According to David Sifry’s, “State of the Blogosphere Report” for August 2006 Technorati tracked it’s 50 millionth blog! Now that’s a lot of writer’s out there - however according to a comment David made in response to Glenn Fannick’s article, “Technorati’s Active Blogs — Perhaps 1.4 Million?“,