Searching for a Blogging Identity...or Blogdentity

I haven't posted much here lately. It seems I've had trouble coming up with topics and narratives to stick in this here HTML-for-dummies they call Blogger. Sure, I haven't had a lot of free time, but that's nothing new. I've found time to blog in the past. Recently, I have struggled in finding this blog's central focus or identity, a blogdentityTM if you will.

I feel that if I could identify what this blog's about, its main theme, then I could figure out what to write next. I thought long and hard about it over the past week. Two hours of driving for my job today was occupied with this puzzle.

Wordle provided my first clue as to running themes and word choice for lim. At first, I tried to use the blog's URL and feed to create a word cloud, but the results seemed skewed toward my most recent posts. To combat this problem and to provide a more random sampling, I pulled the text from about every 25 posts or so, skipping those that were primarily other media. The results can be seen below.

title="Wordle: random living in misery"> src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/683101/random_living_in_misery"
alt="Wordle: random living in misery"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">

I'm not completely sure what to make of the word cloud above.The words "one", "best", "new", and "album" seem to come up the most. "Misery" comes up about as often as "Oberst". "Ohio" and "Obama" to occur as often. No clear message is revealed. I would say that most of what I write is about great new music, but that doesn't account many for other aspects of my life.

Then I decided to check my Google Analytic numbers. Here is some of what I found...
I charted my blog's traffic from the day that Google Analytics has randomly chosen to archive (August 17, 2008) to the present. The highest peak happened to be the day Lucia was born. Apparently, there were a lot of friends checking the site over and over to see if anything had happened. Beyond that (and one random day last November), my numbers have gone up and down, generally trending in the 70-80 range when I post more often and the 40-50 range when I slack. Of course, today I've hit my lowest since September 27th when I was barely blogging at all.
I looked at the ten most visited pages. The main page with the latest post always ranks first, so I'll skip #1. The number two slot has been held down by the same post ever since I started using Google Analytics: "Contemplating Kenny Chesney's Gayness". Believe it or not, this was actually a post about a concert...a concert I never attended, but a post about a concert nonetheless. Next are posts about being an indie rock dad, hipster Christians, and my snarky take on a best of list in COMO. Aside from a couple of sad posts about a friend who committed suicide, various rants about COMO, and several parenting postings, the most visited pages on the blog overwhelmingly have to do with music.

On a side note, the combination of keywords that comes up the most has to do with the whole Kenny Chesney post. In fact, "kenny chesney gay" comes up almost twice as much as the next combination, "living in misery".

I don't know what any of this really has to do with lim's blogdentityTM. It does seem that music comes up the most often. So, maybe that's where I should turn when looking for new content. I did get a new record in the mail. (Guess which one and win a prize.) Maybe I'll post about that.

Either way, thanks for reading and continuing to keep me on your RSS reader despite my lack of production lately. This blog is approaching 500 posts soon. I'd hate to lose any readers because I have writer's block. Look for some new posts really soon.

In the meantime, I'm adding a poll for you to vote on your favorite lim content. It will be near the top right of the page.