The Return

There's nothing more tragic than a neglected blog.  And if I had to choose one word to describe Passionately Apathetic over the past six months, it's just that: neglected.  Unfortunately, blog neglect is serious stuff, not fun and games like child neglect.  What's really sad is that blog neglect is all around us--all you have to do is keep clicking on the "Next Blog" button on the banner at the top of any Blogger site and visit a few random blogs.  More often than not, the latest post is least three years old.  (Please note that I'm not actually encouraging you to click away from this site...you'd miss a spectacular post, and I'm not about to direct traffic away from a blog that's already starving for attention.)

I've been neglectful...however, as the title to this post implies, I'm back!  And I'm here to make things right by squeezing in one more post before 2012 comes to a close.  "The Return" doesn't just refer to my long-overdue blogging comeback; it's also a reference to James's return from Africa last Sunday.  Loyal followers will recall that in June 2010, I published this blog's inaugural post, issuing a challenge to James by claiming I could produce higher quality content on my blog(s) than he could on Life is an Adventure, despite working with remarkably boring content.  For those of you who forgot, here's how my challenge read:

I firmly believe that only about 15% of a story's value comes from what you're writing about, and the other 95% comes from how you write about it.  (If you're wondering about the math, this blog promises to be so entertaining, it requires 110% of my effort.)

Well, the past 31 months flew by, and now James is back.  In case you don't believe me, here's a picture of him eating a good ol' American burrito at Chipotle earlier this week.  If he looks a little confused, it's because he forgot how to assess the quality of food without seeing it covered in flies.

Now that he's back, we can decide once and for all who won this long, drawn out blogging competition.  When I originally issued the challenge, I wasn't really sure how to objectively decide the winner, so I threw out a few great ideas: followers, ad revenue, page views, number of posts, and quality of posts.  We'll just have to take a look at all of those categories to crown the champion.

I finished with an impressive four followers (which, interestingly enough, includes James himself!).  I don't see any followers on James's blog, which means he either doesn't have that particular widget displayed, or he doesn't have any followers.  For simpliticy, we'll assume he has no followers.  Advantage: me.

I won the ad revenue contest hands-down.  Between this blog and Away From the Cubicle, I racked up more than $100 in revenue and received my first offcial payment as a writer this past summer.  I've since been suspended from Ad Sense (turns out Google doesn't like people talking about ad revenue in their blogs while displaying ads alongside those same blog posts...), but that's not really relevant to this analysis.  Advantage: me again.

I don't have access to James's Blogger dashboard to check his official page view count (his Google account got suspended after my 300 unsuccessful password attempts), but the bottom of his blog has a ClustrMaps counter that will get the job done for this category.  My Blogger dashboard tells me my two sites have racked up more than 23,000 page views, dwarfing the mere 10,600 page views on James's blog.  Advantage: me (noticing a pattern here?)

In the next category, number of posts, it's once again no contest.  My two sites boast a total of 180 posts, including 150 consecutive days of blogging on Away From the Cubicle during that glorious February-to-July stretch earlier this year.  You read that right: that's 180 posts, and I've been MIA since July!  James's blog fell a whopping 100 posts short, with just 80 posts in two and a half years.  In case you forgot, he had all the excitement of battling lions and malaria, while I was working on Excel spreadsheets.  Advantage: me.

Though the contest is clearly out of reach, we'll go ahead and assess the final category: quality of blog posts.  Every single Passionately Apathetic post was chock full of pictures, text, humor, and entertainment.  Away from the Cubicle typically included shorter, but no less brilliant, content.  By comparison, a startling number of James's posts included nothing more than a single photo and, if his readers were lucky, maybe a short sentence and a title.  Whoever first said "a picture is worth a thousand words" obviously never read Life is an Adventure.  Worse yet, those random pictures were often creepy and best left unpublished:

And there you have it.  I came up victorious in all five major categories.  The numbers--and the unsettling images--don't lie.  I'd like to thank all my followers for their support in this landslide victory, and also I'd like to publicly apologize to James's readers on his behalf.  It's great to be back...though my fingers are no longer accustomed to all this typing and are starting to cramp.  Happy holidays everyone!