State of the Ramblings

Tomorrow marks the fourth anniversary of Sean’s Ramblings. I never thought when I started this blog that I would make it to a second inauguration. I even surprised myself when I made it through the first inauguration which occurred only about two weeks after this blog began.

Anyway, each year when I write a recap of the past year and what I expect to happen over the next year, I tend to state something like "I don’t know where this site will go." I’ve never been comfortable about what I want this blog to be as I tend to write mostly about sports but also enjoy sharing my opinions on pop culture and certain experiences that happen in my life. Well, this State of the Ramblings is different. After four years, I’m finally comfortable with my blog and what I write about. I’m still going to write about Pittsburgh sports, but I’m not a Pittsburgh sports-only blog. I’m still going to write about what happens in my life, but not everything that happens in my life. In all seriousness, writing solely about my life would make a fairly boring blog as I would write countless posts about Ziggy.



I am extremely proud of the last year of Sean’s Ramblings. I gave a fabulous best man speech; received excellent opinions about whether to support the New Jersey Devils or Philadelphia Flyers; compared Edyta of Dancing With the Stars to Jason Taylor’s high school coach George Novak; informed the world about the Ebay auction where Greg Lloyd would watch the Steelers-Browns game at your house; teamed with lacochran on the "Does Wegmans Rule" experiment; bought Neil Diamond tickets from a bizarre 13 year-old; concluded my year of free burritos; questioned what NFL team Sarah Palin supports and if Hank Williams Jr. really is a Steelers fan; discovered that there are other Sean blogs out there; and had the opportunity to interview Olympian Ric Blas Jr. who represented Guam in judo.



I sold out a little bit this past year. A sports betting website contacted me and offered to pay me money just to have their ad on my site. I accepted. The ad was only here for a month since it didn’t seem to be a good fit for either of us. I also got paid for writing posts about a college football award. While the posts themselves were items that I wanted to write about, the deal was that I would provide a link and a logo to the contest. It was a worthy contest with money going to charities, so I don’t feel bad about selling out. I also received some free books just for a brief mention. I hope the trend of getting free stuff continues. As for having advertisements or getting paid to write about a topic, I guess I'll see what happens if the opportunity arises again. Just know that I write what I want to write about, and I'm not going to write about something I don't believe in just for money. (Sorry for the double negative there.)

As for where my blog is going in its fifth year, I think my general theme will be community. I attended my first blogger happy hour in November and really enjoyed meeting some great people. I hope to participate in more blogger meet-ups this year and getting to know some terrific bloggers better. I’m also working on something fairly big for the Pittsburgh sports blogs community and will have more information about this in February. Speaking of the Pittsburgh sports community, I got a comment from Cotter of One for the Other Thumb (a must-read Steelers and more blog) recently who wrote that it seems that I blog because I love doing it and that was awesome to see. That is as high of a compliment that a blogger can get, especially because it’s true. I really do enjoy writing Sean’s Ramblings and genuinely like where my blog is at this point of my life. While I would write this blog as my own journal, I really appreciate all of you who visit and read. Your support really keeps me going, and I thank you very much for that!