To cut the story short: I’ve been having a good time keeping XSpBlog, but it’s time for a change!

Changes will be the following:
- Post times and numbers will be more flexible. I’ll stop making 6 obligatory posts a day like I’ve been doing for the last year or so;
- Content selection will be far more criterious. What isn’t selected but I still consider worth reading will be on the recently created Recommendations page;
- The free time I’ll get from this will be dedicated for original content creation.

Continue reading if you want the details!

Fellow readers, it’s been almost 2 years XSpBlog is on and running now.
For about one full year I kept the blog running with six full posts everyday, by myself.
But after giving it a LOT of thought, I’ve decided to give the blog a new direction.

Six posts (mostly reposts) might not sound much, but it’s time consuming – and ultimately, with my journalism course and several other projects I have in hands, it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep the pace.
It has been a very interesting experience though, I learned lots from it.

I’m not killing the blog though – far from it.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not worth keeping a tight schedule maintaining the blog with mostly reposts from other blogs – like a news blog – hosted in Brazil but written in english.

In the end, I have no return from that hard work for several different reasons. Few returning readers, about 20 RSS subscriptions, low ranking on worldwide Google results (local results are good though, but mainly because there aren’t too many blogs in Brazil that publishes content in english…). Most of the pageviews I have everyday (about 1200 to 1500) comes from search engines… a good number for a humble blog, but not good enough to pay the hard work, money spent and time it takes.

I always knew this time would come someday. I knew I’d eventually have to choose one language to keep, focus in one subject alone, and most important of all: Focusing on original content.

This holiday was an eyeopener. As I spent several weeks franctically writting posts to keep the daily quota while I was visiting my relatives and a decent Internet connection was something that would be hard to get. And then, on New Years eve, instead of getting to talk with relatives I’d be again working on the blog without rest.

Then, thinking back on 2009, I was reminded how difficult it was to keep the blog going with this new turn of events in my life.
How I had skipped several opportunities, night outs and other events because I was working on the blog migration.
There’s no regret though. Over a thousand daily unique visits is something that came with this hard work, and I’m very grateful for that.

But as a choice not only for the blog and on it’s subject, but also for my own life and on how I wish it to be for now on, I decided to slow down the rhythm and dedicate the new free time I’ll have in creating content rather than republishing it!

All in given time though. I hope no one gets disappointed with this, as I’m aiming to make XSpBlog better.

About the content you’d usually find on XSpBlog, don’t sweat. You can check the new Recommendations page, or go directly to my Google Reader Shared Items page, where I’ll basically make the same content selection I was already making on the blog… I’ll just stop rewritting stuff six times a day.

Thanks to all who have been supporting the blog so far!