Take Paws The official pet travel blog of GoPetFriendly.com

Bullied by the Blog

There are a couple of schools of thought when it comes to blogging. One is to post on a consistent schedule – every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, for example. The hope is that the blog’s readers get into the habit of checking for a new post on those days. It’s the way most bloggers do it – including us … until yesterday.

Another school of thought is to post only when you’ve written something you are excited to share. The theory here is that the blog’s readers wait with baited breath for every post, because they know the author only delivers top-notch stuff – something he/she thinks is important, is passionate about, and can’t wait to share with them. This is our philosophy going forward.

Let me explain the reason for the change.

Last week was a bit out of control here. We’ve had some delays with the closing process on the house and it’s still unclear if we are on schedule or not. Regardless, we’ve been packing and making appointments as if December 22^nd is our last day here. On Thursday and Friday Rod was providing expert testimony in Pennsylvania State Court – a stressful event that required a lot of preparation and resulted in many hours of lost sleep. And, on Saturday, while driving home from an afore mentioned appointment, the check engine light came on in the RAV4. By Sunday – which is usually a workday here – we both desperately needed to recharge. We decided to play hooky and spend the entire day on the sofa watching movies.

That decision did not come without some angst. I knew if I didn’t work on Sunday the blog post for Monday would not be ready. And then it occurred to me … I’d had that feeling before. There was the time the winery tour in the Finger Lakes came to an unceremonious end because of a looming blog deadline. Time with friends in Charlevoix was cut short, and a campfire with my family was missed entirely due to an unfinished posts that just had to go up. Well, no more!

I’m making my New Year’s resolution a little early: I’m going to savor the experiences that will come with traveling in the Winnebago in 2011, and I will not sacrifice that enjoyment to meet an artificial deadline I’ve imposed upon myself. I will not be bullied by the blog.

It’s silly, really. Rod and I are so looking forward to RVing full-time, mostly because we won’t have the pressure of time. There is no foreseeable “end date” of our trip. We don’t have anywhere we must be by a particular date. The freedom is palpable! Yet, we would bind ourselves to a posting schedule and give up the very thing we are working so hard to create.

I love writing this blog. I love that our readers have become a community where we share and discuss our experiences. I want that to continue to grow.

I also want to be free to live in the moment. I want to take time to enjoy the simple things with Rod and the dogs, without the chest-tightening, gut-wrenching cloud of “blog post deadline” hanging over me. I don’t want writing posts to go from something I do because it’s fun to something that feels like a job.

My hope is that by removing the pressure of the schedule, the posts are even better. I hope you will feel the excitement and the love we have for what we are doing. That’s really what this is about, after all.

Even though we may not be posting on a set schedule, we will be posting multiple times a week and we hope you’ll stop by regularly. If you’re thrown a bit by the lack of structure, there are a couple of ways to make sure you don’t miss a post. You can sign up to receive them by email (just click the envelop icon at the top of the next column), or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you’re not familiar with RSS – it may be the greatest thing EVER. It’s like your own personal Internet library. Just add your subscriptions and new content from your favorite sites will show up in one place. Add search terms like “mountain biking” or “pet travel” and articles from across the web will automatically appear for your perusal. I use Google Reader and here’s what mine looks like:

So in 2011, our posts may not show up with military precision. But I can guarantee they will be heart-felt pieces I’ve taken pleasure in writing.