I hate blog posts about blogging. This is a blog post about blogging.

Two years ago, maybe, I stopped regularly hyperlinking in blog posts.

The time it took, the research, the copy/pasting drove me insane. Do I stop in the middle of my thought to get the link? Do I wait until the post is written then spend another 30 minutes with seven open browser tabs trying to cross-reference the post just so?

I think, as I announced my no-more-hyperlinking, my exact words were: everyone has a copy of The Google. If you wanted to know what the hell I was talking about, you could go look it up. Evil, I know. And a little lazy. I mean, what if you went searching for the book or article or blog post and, instead of finding what I may have been writing about, you stumbled over something completely different and all kinds of wonderful? What kind of shit would that be, right?

These days, I’m posting on the fly either very close to midnight or during a baby nap, typing with one finger—including the moneycracking shift key—while constantly pushing Ehren’s toes off the keyboard as he dream-fits. I have a compromise that I think works very well. Over in the right sidebar is the column “what I read all day”. I let the template code hyperlink for me to your blog and other blogs I would read all day if I weren’t more than a little occupied. If your post title looks interesting enough for me to click, I click through and read what you have to say.

Unless you’re on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, your blog post is about 100,000 characters too long for me. Following your tweets, I get it. All of it. Even more than what you say on the blog because the 140 characters is like a brain burst if you’re being personal and not all business-tweety. “Where the fuck is my breakfast bagel” at three in the afternoon is far more revealing of your personality than a blogged review of your favorite books.

Dang, you’re on Facebook, too? All class reunions all the time. Nothing Earth-shattering happening over there except discovering former classmates’ political views. I actually shared a lunch table with a guy who belongs to the  “I will light a dog’s penis on fire if anyone I know ever has a partial birth abortion” group with its 3,562 members? Ew. I had such the crush on him, too.

We’re all busy. No hard feelings from this little hidden blog with its 11 readers. My most faithful readers are the ones who don’t even have to read the stupid thing—I’m a phone call or an email away. Three years ago, I would have died on the spot if my weekly stats showed only 50 hits, half of them being from Q. I used to tease one of my blogging friends when she would get 300 comments on a post about ketchup. I think one day I wrote about naming our new puppy and had more comments than this blog will get in the next five years. Things have changed. The personal blog used to be the only stop on what is now myriad stations for social media. It seems like your audience has dwindled, but it’s actually grown, meeting you instead in 100 other places.

Bring your own hyperlinks.