So this is the big break up, dear blog. This is where I tell you that it’s not you… it’s me. I just can’t devote the time you deserve anymore. Sure we’ve had some good times. We’ve faced some rough times together too, but ultimately you could do better. The drive space you take up on our shared server could be used by someone who can love and tend their blog like a garden. I’ve never been that good at gardening, and lately I haven’t been that good at blogging. Your 99.999% uptime has been fantastic, but I haven’t really used it. Who knows… maybe the next person that comes along will be a big e-commerce site? Think of the money you’d make just sitting here accepting traffic. Maybe you’ll be selling the next big thing.

Just don’t turn into one of “those sites”. You know the kind… the sort of site that fathers tell their sons not to get mixed up with. You could prostitute yourself out… you’ve certainly got the goods… but don’t do it. Ultimately you’d just end up cast aside in the gutter, infected with viruses and spyware and begging for enough bandwidth for your next high.

No, my precious web site… don’t do that. Find yourself a good companion who’ll love you. Maybe you could do charity work? Raise money to fight hunger or some exotic disease.

Whatever the future holds, oh blog of mine… just remember the good times. I’ll still be around on the net somewhere. Maybe we’ll bump into one another. Don’t be offended if I don’t recognize you. I’m sure your new person will give you a face lift and clean you up, heck they’ll probably put you on a fitness program to get those extra pounds off and you’ll look fabulous. Oh I’m not calling you fat, but let’s be honest we haven’t exactly exercised together and things could use some toning up. It’s my fault really. I’m the one who got you in this shape.

Don’t cry. I can’t stand to see you like this. Honestly, how could you not see this coming? I mean, you know I’ve been running around with those microblogging sites for a while now. I’m just setting you free, you’ll be fine without me. I’m just glad we didn’t have any subdomains together. That would be messy, and honestly who wants to stay together just so we can give our subdomains a normal life only to know that someday they’d mature onto their own Fully Qualified Domain Names and we’d have wasted all those years together.

I’ve tried to protect you, you know. Remember when all those people were putting nasty comments on your posts? I installed the best spam filter that money could buy. I didn’t want you thinking too much about all those people out there selling their wares and linking to sites you can’t tell your mother about. No, I just couldn’t have them treating you that way. I’d never want you to have those problems, but from here you are going to be on your own. You are a big blog now and there are all sorts of automatic protection features available that can keep you safe from all the dark corners of the Internet.

This is goodbye. I’ll check in on you for a few months until my subscription runs out and then you’ll go on without me. It’s really better this way. Don’t feel like you have to do anything else. I’d understand if you never wanted me to browse to you again. I’ll always bookmark you in my heart.

No, believe it or not this isn’t a post about Alabama beating Auburn like a rented mule. They did, and I’m happy about it, but that isn’t where I’m headed with this post.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll probably notice that I tend to use it as an outlet for my frustrations. I still blog about things I find funny or for the occasional victory lap, but one of the main themes here seems to be rants. This is a great outlet for that sort of thing because I can get it out without exploding on someone and I can moderate myself a bit to keep from being overly offensive here as well. (That edit feature is great!)

A newsletter I read sometimes had an article the other day about people who keep a journal, and the idea was what difference would it make if we wrote positive things about our spouse versus writing the things we don’t like about them. Now, I don’t rant about my wife here. She is my best friend and my biggest fan, and even though we aren’t still on the honeymoon, we don’t fight enough to count and when we do it is usually over in a few hours (including the “I won’t be the one to talk first” phase. I usually give in first).

This article got me to thinking: When I write negative things here, how does that effect me? Do I get the much needed stress relief from it, or does it feed my negativity? If I took a year and only wrote positive posts, what would it do to my attitude in the rest of my life? What are the benefits and drawbacks to just being positive and disregarding the reality of the bad days I have?

Well, I think I have reached a conclusion on those questions.

I think that while I’m writing it, I get fired up about my negative stuff and really lay it out on the blog. When I get done writing and move on to other things I find that I don’t harbor those feelings as long or as deeply as if I don’t hash it out here. Yes: it does relieve my stress and I think if I only wrote positive things I probably wouldn’t write much. This isn’t because I don’t have positive things in my life, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I probably wouldn’t know what to write about. It also wouldn’t really capture the more authentic moments in my life, and that’s really the goal for the blog.

So, while I think it’s a great thing to focus on the positive things in life, ignoring the frustrations doesn’t really benefit me.

I do agree that it’s better to focus on the things we love about our spouse as opposed to the things that drive us completely insane about them, but in the context of a life journal or blog it just doesn’t make sense to totally ignore those things.

What I am going to do is try to balance my writing a little more. I’m not going to keep a spreadsheet comparing positive vs negative and work some sort of ratio to make sure I’m staying fair, but I am going to try to find more good things to write about.

Maybe do some writing on the new bible study we are about to start in Life Group about marriage and relationships. That should prove to have some positive and definitely some humorous moments!

Oh: ROLL TIDE! (Woohoo! Score one for the positive posts!)

Those who would like to use the feedburner RSS feed, it’s back in the loop.

Thanks for the tips, Grant!

I think I finally got the RSS feed fixed to Grant’s specifications, but you may need to re-subscribe to the feed (I bypassed feedburner).

Thanks for all the comments on my last couple of posts. Makes me feel good to have so many readers. Over 10% of my hits for the past month have come in the last 24 hours.

I have, at the request of some readers, added an RSS feed. There is a link to the right, or you can visit http://plunkettshack.com/blog for the link in the address bar (not sure why it doesn’t work on the blog.plunkettshack.com referrer)

More to come.