Blogging Stats and Our Daily Walk of Faith

How does your blogging life look? Are you consistent, true, and purposeful when it comes to writing or participating with your blog (or put in another part of your life you take some value with)… no… me neither. I was thinking about this the other day when I really couldn’t find the words for a blog post and just decided to let it go.

Of course then I started drawing parallels of our Christian walk and the consistency in which we blog, and what effect it has on our blog. Once you start blogging for any considerable length of time (a few years for me), you start to think of life in terms of blog posts. I went to see this sporting event, ahhhh good blog post, this guy just cut me off in the highway, let me snap a photo and it will make a great blog post.

How do you know what the effect of writing that blog post has on your blog. We check the stats. Do you love stats as much as I do? I wish I could stat out everything sometimes. I love looking at collections of data like that, it tells us where we can improve, where we failed, where we succeeded. How often do we check our daily walk stats?

Our Daily Walk

Probably 5% of my ideas for blogs posts actually make it to my computer. I would say another 50% of those never make it out of a draft. But what happens to our blog when we just let it go, then try to pick it up, then let it go, well, just check the stats. It looks like an up and down mess, usually.

This graph above is a daily graph of my other photo blog. The piece in the middle there is typical, just up and down with the wind it seems, but it is directly related with what I do with the blog. When I post, the stats go up, when I don’t, they go down. That is how I usually feel in my walk with Christ. I am inspired and walking great one day and the next something happens and I neglect my prayer life that day (or any number of other things), and I feel brought down a notch.

One thing that has taken me a long time to realize is my walk is going to be an up and down event. For some reason we often think once we become Christians we are riding up that hill till we hit those pearly gates, and it just isn’t that way, and the Bible tells us this too.

Among many different places in the Bible, we read in John 16:33

33 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

I love reading that verse. It reminds me that our life here on earth is not trouble free just because we are Christians, but, it doesn’t say we can just live like the world, forget our walk and our relationship with Christ will be the same.

Our Weekly Walk

I have been a Christian for more than 10 years now, so I have longer stats to look at than just a daily graph. So what if we could look at our walk on a weekly basis instead.

This graph has a little more data. This is showing me the 17th week of the year of 2008 up to week 33-34 of this year. Still some ups and downs visible, but now we can see a trend? I may not be getting it done like I would like every single day, day after day, but I have an overall goal with my blog to keep it fresh and create growth within the blog. So without getting to deep, you get the idea. We can’t keep looking at our daily failures in our walk with Jesus as the sum of our walk. We have a goal as Believers, right, to keep growing and mature in our faith and our walk with the Lord.

Our Monthly Walk

Take it one step farther out and look at our monthly walk (the image at the top).

Now we’re talking. I can see that month 11, 12 of 2007 weren’t so good, although they were in existence, but look at the trend. Can we look back over our walk with Christ in months and years and see growth? We may not think so, but if we check the stats of our daily walk, in terms of months and years, we will hopefully find we have grown, but don’t forget about that little notch at the very end of this graph.

What do you do on your blog when you can’t find something to write or just don’t feel like messing with it? I guess I write about stats. Try to plug away at your blog if it is important to you, you will be rewarded yourself by just looking back over time to see how you have grown as a blogger and what you found was important enough to put down in words.

Don’t feel guilty about neglecting your blog either, just open the admin screen, hit the “create new entry” and write something that is on your mind. I have read blog posts that were one word and were great posts. One of my most popular posts was just one photo, so it doesn’t have to be a long drawn out message like this.