Rants & Raves X

There been times when I thought I couldn't last for long,
But now I think I'm able to carry on.
It's been a long, a long time coming,
But I know a change gon' come, oh yes it will.
- Sam Cooke

As I approach ten years of blogging next year, I've decided to switch things up in preparation & one of those things happens to be the retiring of this series, much to the disdain of many lol. But as many things must come to an end, so does this, & what better way than the tenth chapter. I'm not going to short change you by any means, this will be long lol. But I'm not going to hold you up with all the mushy stuff, let's get into it.

Why did I choose to change up my blog, well the answer is simple, because I wanted to lol. No but really, as times change and you evolve as a person, I felt it was time to let things go and pick things up, and my blog was one of the things that I chose to pick up. This blog is my baby man, and I know with the more I become visible to the rest of the blogging community, especially the #BlackBlogger community, I'm going to be more receptive to critiques and criticisms. That makes me excited because I'm ready for the challenge of becoming one of the best blogs on the net. I have a lot of goals for next year, and a lot of them deal with this here site, but I'll get into that later in a post coming in December.

But one of the things that I've been participating in on the low are group discussion involving bloggers, writers, and people looking to break into hosting. It's headed by a really great mentor & professor, who's basically the moderator for our group because the discussions take a left turn sometimes. I wish I could mention him & the group by names, but we all agreed that it's best to let it ride and stay under the radar for now.
But a topic came about called, Low Visibility.

So we had this group discussion about how to blog without having to give up personal privacy to make quality, authentic posts. Basically they were saying that it's two types of bloggers in this world, the ones that rely on their personal life heavily, writing about every single thing, making personal business public knowledge. Even if it means putting out peoples personal business that have no business seeing the light of day. Then there are those bloggers that know how to write posts that incorporate aspects of their life & others into each post without being obvious or specific to everyone but the people they are talking about, rather than writing literals and giving out specific information.

Like for instance, some bloggers blog "my mom is this and that", with no regards to how they paint them, all in the same breath, destroying and deeming someone that their suppose to protect. While other bloggers will make a post about how certain things should be in certain situations with certain people, rather than throwing out a specific personal experience or private situations. One person even dared to go as far as saying that the people who know how to incorporate aspects of life, make it entertaining, while not giving out any personal information, are actually great writers.

In addition to being able to incorporate, it's more noticeable and more receptive for when you do finally speak in literals. I mean at the end of the day, it's your blog and you choose the content which you want to post. It's no one's business what you choose to post, that's the 1st amendment at work. But at the end of the day, we all should have some sense of privacy, or couth, in our lives, just so we can avoid that eventual headache of people always acting like they know you and / or causing drama all of the time because they know exactly what buttons to push. That's just me, that's my view, and a couple of other people's view on how blogging should be. But you know you always have those new people that swear they know up and down what they're doing when they come into something new.

One new person went as far as pointing out that I've had my blog since 2009 and I've only managed 20,000 views. Oh boy, that conversation got pretty real, pretty fast. If it's one thing that irritates me, it's when a person compares something that has nothing that deals with another thing, especially when it comes to blogging. You can see a blog getting over 10k views a day, and not really have what a person is looking for, and a blog that averages 10 views a day probably could all the knowledge in the world, and be perfect for you. That's like in the blogging handbook I'm sure, don't compare blogs because we all do something different than the other. That's why we SUPPORT each other, and we have guest spots on other bloggers sites. Because we all bring a different view of life, that's some of what makes blogging great, eye opening things.
BUT! I did have to flex right quick, because unknowing to this individual, I've maintained my own website since 2005, that I built from scratch using pure C++ codes. Way before there was blogger, WordPress, and people who made layouts for you. Because yea you know, this is my counter from the site right here.

Add the little ol "20,000" views that I have from my current site, and that's 450,000 views. I think I have a pretty good handle on how to create, run and maintain a sight. But any who, I had to point out to this person that I didn't have anytime from 2009-2013 basically because of the Army being a lifestyle and not just a full time job. I had to quickly and soundly let this "new blogger" know what the deal was, and it's funny because the other person that was present looked just like this meme ..

Now I will say this it's good to have healthy competition between bloggers, like anything in life, just don't let it get you promptly corrected and dismissed. But while we're on the topic of people trying to tell me about MY blog, and how it's ran.

I post the things I post because I can, it's MY content, on MY site.

*Takes a deep breath*
Let's shoot the shit for a second. I know the race relations in this country is slowly reaching the boiling point of an all out assault on each other in broad daylight. I know the young and old alike are being targeted and killed, with the killers being let off. I know those killers happen to be Caucasian and that a lot of other Caucasians are coming to the forefront and openly speaking their disdain towards the African-American population. I am not only enraged at the blatant assignations of so many innocent lives within my community, it's all sad because humanity as a whole seems to be unraveling at the edges, and it doesn't look like it's going to get any better, any time soon.

With that being said, I can't just post any and everything that I want to because at the end of the day, there are ramifications that I would face for speaking in such a manner due to contractual obligations. I could not only put myself in a financial mess, a bad position for my family & close friends, I could also face jail time if they deemed the comments to be such. It's a messed up world that I live in, but hey, I put my name on the dotted line and I choose to do it, so I can't be mad about that fact. Will I ever talk about it? I'm pretty sure I will. Have I written anything about it? Yes I have. But the time isn't right for me to speak upon it.

Some people won't like that statement, but it's the truth and it is what it is. At the end of the day, I have to take the proper steps to ensure that I'm fine financially, and in today's world, it's hard to do that without losing some of your moral fiber because most employers don't want the "distractions" to take away from their production deadlines. And on the same foot, I don't want to constantly write about the bad in the world, that's just tiring. There's a lot of great things that are going on, there's a lot of advice that can be given, there are a lot things to be seen, life continues to go on. But the day will come when I have to join the fight, just know that I'm ready.
You know, I enjoy these little talks that we have wit each other, looking back at all of the years of doing this, I've come a long way. I know that the first Rants & Raves isn't up, I did that on purpose. The first one was actually on my first site, which is still up, but no one buy close friends can have that link lol. But I know that once I get into phase two of what I want to do with Cold Knowledge, it will make it's way to the site, along with a lot of other content.

I was going to make this the last entry as you can see from the opening paragraph, but I decided in the process of writing this I just have so much fun writing these and getting stuff off my chest. I know the next entry won't be for a long time because I have a lot of blogs ready to go, or maybe not, who knows how I feel when that time comes.

Until next time guys.

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