One year of blogging at Café Turco

Jump to Comments

This month my blog is completing one year since it was launched. Time for an assessment…

This is a small blog, in one year I had just a bit more than 15 thousand visits, and, although my audience has been steadily growing, it seldom goes above 100 visits a day. I really don’t mind that at all and to make that clear to anyone passing by I have left on my side bar the number of visits. It is the fact that this is a small blog that allows me to have comments without prior moderation. This gives me a particular pleasure, since I find the interaction of readers through comments very stimulating, and I am very glad that steadily my posts started receiving more comments, sometimes simple messages of people that liked what they read, sometimes more elaborated comments, most of them relevant. The cosy environment of this blog clearly made it unattractive to hate comments, because I don’t usually get those, but when I do I erase them because I don’t like trouble makers coming here and disrupting this nice environment.

The year that is now drawing to a closure was very intense and rewarding. I travelled a lot, worked a lot and met very interesting people. I tried to reflect that in the contents, by writing about different subjects, sharing my experiences and my perspective. I wish I had written more, but living things intensively has a side effect, stress, which sometimes makes it harder to focus, and the fact that I am not using my own native language, Portuguese also makes it harder to express myself, and I’d rather not post anything than to say dumb things or commonplaces. I guess this is rather common, most bloggers pass through this, and eventually this feeling goes away, inspiration returns and I really don’t think we should make our blogging an aditional source of stress, when we can avoid that (sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially when nasty people comes with their hatred and tries to defeat us through exhaustion, but in those cases, our sense of duty provides us with a resilience unknow to such people).

The best about blogging is that the absense of an editorial filter allows us to get in touch with people and ideas which wouldn’t be so easily accessible. Furthermore, the possibility to establish informal networks with other blogs very widely expands the impact of each of those blogs. The interaction thus created can be very rewarding and stimulating.

So, to conclude, I am very happy with my cosy blog and would like to thank my readers, regulars and passers-by, as well as the writers of the blogs that have linked me, in particular Marko Attila Hoare, from Greater Surbiton, who wrote a very nice post that helped boost my audiences, and Daniel from the Srebrenica Genocide Blog, whom I really admire for the way he is devoted to the cause of keeping alive the memory of the Srebrenica genocide.

Plans for the year that is about to start: lots of them, but mostly I hope to start writing more about my own country, Portugal, since it is so under represented in english language blogosphere.

Now, some posts that I think are good enough (well, at least the photos are good enough):

April 25th about the politics of memory, or rather the politics of oblivion of Portugal’s fascist past;

Srebrenica some impressions on my trip to Srebrenica last July;

Defending animals’ well being in Belgrade some impressions about a city where I feel particularly at home;

and Why Serbia? in case someone may be curious about…

17 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized