Casual hobby, fun escape from the offline world, convenient method of connecting with friends and family — many types of blogging never threaten to disrupt the basic patterns of daily life. But something about blogging, like keeping a diary, becomes important and seems to become alive. Some people know they want to blog seriously even before they start. Others are surprised by how much they love it as they get
involved. This chapter is about some of the issues that arise in daily, determined blogging.

Here’s the truth: Blogging is a grind. A joy, to be sure, but difficult to sustain over the long haul. Creating frequent entries can seem like a chore. Of course, nobody is putting a gun to your head. At least, I don’t suppose so; if somebody is putting a gun to your head, you have bigger troubles than deciding what to write about.

The pressure in blogging is the need to blog often and to keep the blog going over weeks and months. It’s easy enough to blog often for a short while (usually at the start), and it’s easy enough to blog infrequently for a long period. But putting the two together is harder than most people realize when they
are contemplating their first blog. There’s the imaginary gun to your head again: Nobody can force you to post entries every day or continue your blog for the rest of your life. But because the definition of a blog is a Web site that makes it easy for the owner to make frequent updates, the underlying point of most blogs is to write in them often. And to accumulate an historical archive of those writings. That’s two points. Oh, and to get readers; that’s three. Oh! And to keep those readers.