In the first major change to this blog since… a long time ago, I have moved the hosting of Cut the Chatter from Blogger to WordPress. The URL hasn’t changed, nor has the RSS feed, or anything else in terms of reading the blog so you, dear reader, shouldn’t really notice a huge difference. The blog itself will look different, particularly if I get off my butt and actually try to make it look nice, but that should be it. But because it’s on WordPress, I may have the ability to do cool things that I couldn’t do before. Not that I have any ideas what those might be, but there are a million WordPress plug-ins out there so I’ll have to peruse what’s available and maybe play around with them.

The initial reason I made this switch was basically because Twitter changed their API a year or two ago. Because of that change, the Twitter plug-in for Windows Live Writer (which I use to write all my articles) no longer worked, so when I published an article, I had to manually tweet the link, and then I’d manually post the link to Facebook. I got tired of that, so I looked for services to do it for me. Surely this is simple – check an RSS feed once every hour and when a new article shows up, tweet / post the title of the article along with a link to it. How hard can that be?

Well, I tried about four of them. In every case, it sometimes worked fine while other times the auto-tweets / postings would take many hours or even days to show up, if they showed up at all. After losing patience with the fourth one, I asked for help on Facebook and Twitter. Marisa said that if I used WordPress I got that ability for free, and a bunch of other things as well. I was hesitant about WordPress because when I looked into switching a few years ago, I discovered I had to pay to use cutthechatter.com (instead of cutthechatter.wordpress.com), while Blogger let me change my domain name for free. I’m not going to pay for something I can get for free, am I? Well, when enough people tell you “yes, it’s worth it”, then you start to think about it. From what I’ve seen so far, $26 per year (for both this blog and my lacrosse blog) is indeed worth it.

Let me know what you think! Not only will it give me some welcome feedback but it will allow me to test out WordPress comments!

Update: Unfortunately, the twitter thing didn’t work. No tweet, no Facebook post, no Google+ post when this article was published. I think it’s because I use Windows Live Writer rather than publishing from the web site. It’d be awfully ironic if the very reason I switched was to get a feature that I can’t use anyway.
Update 2: The Twitter/Facebook/Google+ thing works fine, as long as you publish the article from the web site. If I publish it from Windows Live Writer, I get nothing. So now I post the article to the blog as a draft, then go go the web site and publish it from there. I can also choose to publish it at a future date/time as well.

Hey! Remember me? I used to blog at this site quite a bit. But in the last year or so, things have really gotten quiet around here. It’s not that I’ve stopped writing, in fact I’m writing more than ever. It just ain’t here.

Back in 2008, I wrote 165 articles on this blog, including 20 articles in September alone. In 2009, I dropped to 122, and then dropped by exactly half to 61 in 2010.  But I was sick for half of 2010, and came back a little in 2011 with 82 articles. In August of 2011 I joined In Lax We Trust (now InLacrosseWeTrust.com) and moved all my lacrosse writing over there. Four months later, I created my own lacrosse blog, nllchatter.com,  and a month after that I started writing for ILIndoor.com. I’m actually a pretty big player in the world of indoor lacrosse now. (I can write that here because the lacrosse people who know that that’s a total crock don’t read this blog and the people who read this blog don’t follow lacrosse to know that that’s a total crock. Except that I just told you. Crap.)  I still do a lot of writing for those two sites, and as a result my output here has dropped off. I dropped again by over half to only 33 in 2012, and this article (early February) is the first one of 2013.

For those of you who have been disappointed about this apparent drop in productivity (hi Candyce!), you have my sincere apologies. It was not my objective to abandon this site. But in order to stay current on the National Lacrosse League, I have to focus a lot of my spare time there so that I (appear to) know what the heck I’m talking about. Between that and taking the boys to soccer and swimming during the week and spending time with Gail and the boys on weeknights and weekends and visiting relatives all over Ontario and oh yeah, that pesky full-time job, I don’t end up with a lot of time for other writing. I do miss it though, and when I look and see that my most recent article was posted six weeks ago, I get kinda sad for my poor neglected little blog.

That said, please understand that I am not under the delusional impression that there are thousands, hundreds, or even dozens of people clamoring for me to write more. I write here because I enjoy writing and the occasional discussion that comes out of it.

There are two other other reasons I don’t write here as much as I used to. The first is to stop annoying people. In looking back over my previous non-lacrosse articles, many of them in the last year or two are related to skepticism, eg. why vaccines are good, why legislating some alternative medicines makes no sense, why the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are all nuts, stuff like that. I decided to tone it down a little on that front since I felt like I was starting to become that guy that people stop listening to because he just rants all the time. I still have an article or two in the queue in this vein, so it won’t entirely disappear. Natural News aficionados, beware.

The other reason is Facebook. Other than skepticism and lacrosse, most of what I wrote were comments on random articles I read on the web and short funny stories about my kids. These days, I frequently find myself posting these to Facebook instead of writing a whole article about them. This isn’t a conscious decision, it’s just how things have worked out. If I have a lot to say on a subject I’ll write an article about it, but there have been a few times where I’ve wanted to say something but just didn’t have the time to say it all so I just post it on Facebook.

I have at least ten articles in the queue. Most are just ideas that I’ve had and currently consist of single sentences that I will eventually expand. A few have been started, some are about half done, and at least one has been mostly done for a year but is likely way out of date so I almost have to start it over. There’s one I’m having fun with but it involves a lot of creativity and thus is very time-consuming.

So the take-home message here is that I have not abandoned this blog and will still post things from time to time. Some of them might even be entertaining – you know the old bit about the blind squirrel occasionally finding a nut.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed a slowdown in the number of postings over the last five months or so. This is because of the other two blogs I’ve been writing for: NLLChatter.com (my own lacrosse blog) and ILIndoor.com, the premier box (indoor) lacrosse blog anywhere. Since late December, I’ve written twenty articles on ILIndoor (listed here) and almost eighty articles on NLLChatter. By way of comparison, I’ve written all of ten here.

The National Lacrosse League season ended a little over a week ago. There are indoor lacrosse leagues in the summer, as well as a field lacrosse league, but I don’t really follow them, so I’m pretty much done with lacrosse until next winter. So now that I have more free time to not write about lacrosse, and because the weather is beautiful outside, I’m finding that sitting at the computer and writing about other things is a little less of a draw now than it has been in the past. I’m quite sure this is temporary, and I do have a number of articles in the queue either needing polish or waiting to be written. In fact, one of them will likely be posted later today.

So do not worry, faithful reader, that I have quit the blogging game. Stick with me and there’ll be more articles coming – and I guarantee that you’ll get the same amount of insight and wisdom as you’ve always gotten from me. Interpret that last sentence as you will.

Back in November, I found out that my blog had been nominated for a 2011 Canadian Blog Award. Well, the results from the first round of voting are in, and I am excited to say that I placed fifth out of 39 in the Best Personal Blog category. Thanks very much to everyone who voted for me, but we’re not done yet! The final round has already begun, and now there are only five nominees. The vote counts have been reset to 0, and we vote again.

My blog got 34 votes in the first round, while the blog in the lead got 81, so I’ve got some ground to make up but with your help, dear reader, we can do it. Please vote, and I don’t want to put any undue pressure on anyone or use guilt trips or anything, but if you don’t tell your friends and family to vote too, well I guess the terrorists have won. And it’s your fault.

Voting began on December 24, and ends on January 20. Go and vote now! (Note that I was unable to see the names of the nominees on the voting page when using Chrome, but IE and Firefox work.)

Again, thanks to whoever nominated me and to everyone who voted for me.

Yesterday someone left a comment on a recent article of mine. I get the occasional comment when my articles are posted to facebook but very rarely on the blog itself, so the fact that I got a comment at all was pretty cool. The comment said that the article was “brilliantly written”, which is even more cool, but the next sentence blew me away:

I found you through the Canadian Blog Awards and no wonder you’re up there!

Ummm, what? First off, I had never heard of the Canadian Blog Awards. That’s fine, there are a zillion things on the internet that I am unaware of. But how would you find my blog on a blog awards site unless… no.

As it turns out, yes! Someone has nominated Cut The Chatter in the Best Personal Blog category. I am extremely flattered, honoured, and surprised by this. There are a few reasons I’m surprised:

• It’s just me and my blog. I like to think that at times it’s insightful and entertaining, but come on. It’s just me. My wife doesn’t even read it.
• I’m up against some other blogs with hundreds of regular readers. I have three members. Only one of my last ten articles has been viewed 100 times. More people read my stuff through facebook and RSS and I can’t count those, but I’d bet that the average article I write here is read by less than 50 people total.
• My content is all over the map. Personal stories, lacrosse and other sports, skepticism, technology, music, whatever.
• Sometimes I write four posts in a week, sometimes four posts in a month. No consistency at all.

So that’s why I’m surprised about the fact that I was nominated. But I’m also surprised about the nomination process itself:

• Whoever nominated me did not tell me they were nominating me. To the nominator: First off, thank you very much. Secondly, please don’t feel pressured to reveal your identity to me. If you would prefer to remain anonymous, that’s totally fine.
• The awards site itself did not contact me to tell me I was nominated.

That second one seems especially weird. The site itself (which is simply a blog with links to pages on a generic polling site) is obviously not updated very often – the 2010 award winners were announced last October, and there are only three articles since then. One of them says that the 2011 awards were delayed because of a lack of nominees. The About/Contact page talks about “this year (2010)”. The Rules page talks about the 2010 awards as being in the future. It makes me wonder how many people actually vote on these awards – did the winner in a particular category get 50 votes? 500? 50,000? I have no idea. Oddly, there are also the Canadian Weblog Awards which seem to be unrelated to the Canadian Blog Awards.

Having said all that, regardless of whether these awards are voted on by 50 people or 50 thousand, it’s a cliché but it’s true – it’s an honour just to be nominated. I’m truly flattered by this, and every time I’ve thought about it since I found out yesterday, I smile and just shake my head. Last week someone at work told me that he enjoys reading my facebook statuses and notes (i.e. blog posts), and that made my day. Then this past Monday, someone on twitter told me that I was her favourite lacrosse writer, and that also made my day. And now this.

I never wanted to be a writer, I never studied journalism, I never even liked creative writing in school, and I hated writing essays. I started this blog on a whim in April of 2005 and have been writing about whatever ever since. It’s only in the last three years or so that I’ve discovered that I really love doing it, and to have people tell me they enjoy what I write is amazingly rewarding. To be nominated for this award and have people vote for me is just mind-blowing beyond words. Thank you so much to my secret admirer whoever nominated me and to everyone who’s voted for me.

Well, what are you waiting for? Don’t waste any more time listening to me gush.  Go vote!