I just added Wordpress Stats to my toolbag on this blog. I needed to upgrade my site and I had been putting it off . I was running up against technical blocks that I just couldn’t bring myself to face.  Finally, I did it in one fell swoop, staying up until 2am (which for me is really late) and finishing up the next morning.

I never had the site down, but things did break along the way. Thanks goodness for google, apparently everyone else had run into the same bug and being persistent in searching for the problem finally paid off when I found someone’s posted solution. It turned out that one of the plugins was not compatible with the new version of wordpress, which screwed up the whole dashboard plugin interface.

But what turned out to be far more interesting than these technical details is the affect that adding a stat program to my blog has had on how I perceive the blog, itself.

To back up a little, I had alreadywalked into a blogging identity crisis.  My blogging has really been fueled and buoyed by these really remarkable experiences that I have had in foster parenting. I mean, here are stories worth telling and it is not hard to make them readable and interesting.  Now that I am taking a break from that life, the content and the tone and form of my writing and interest is rapidly changing.

So, how does this relate to adding the stat counter… It related because I am very surprised at where my search engine hits are coming from and this can’t help but influence me in thinking about the direction of my blog. I get multiple hits every single day for an old post that discusses a postural analysis class that I took and “rotoscoliosis”, which I suffer from (a very mild case).  Somehow, it got towards the top of google web and image hits.  Looking at the post in retrospect, if I had known how many people would see it, I would have written it differently and made to be much more useful to people.  I also see that it is also my only single post in my “massage” category (which was a surprising fact, in itself).

Probably many of my regular readers don’t even know that I am a massage therapist!  I have been using my facebook massage page to post regularly about massage and health related topics, although most of what I post is not actually my own writing, but links to useful resources that I find.

So in the end, this question of identity becomes a question of scope.  I have, after all, created all of these categories that I expected to represent the scope of my blog, which in turn represents the scope of my life. (Yes, sometimes I do consider the scope of my life to be a bit broad!) A blog is a  more personal form of writing than many other forms (although there can be exceptions), and this is something that draws me to it. As my life meanders, so will my blog.  It looks like the side of my river has filled up with sediment and the opposite bank is beginning to move.