Blogging is hard. It’s a medium that first surfaced decades ago and was routinely ignored. Then it went viral and soon everyone on the planet had a blog. Five years later (125 internet years), blogs were much too passé for the pretty people who migrated to other forms of social media. I read once that between Wordpress and Blogspot there are more than a billion abandoned blogs. Ghost towns. Crickets. Most failed to launch with hordes of bloggers having created less than a thousand total words before going silent.

What can I say? Writing content no one asked for isn’t easy and always a bit of a slippery slope. It’s even more difficult doing it for a specific genre, like ham radio. There’s a fairly tight circle of ham radio bloggers, maybe fifty in total. At least that’s what I regularly see in my feed reader. There are many more of course, but hundreds are hit and miss, posting only a couple times each year. Some go a decade between posts. Forgive me if my estimate of ham bloggers offends, it’s touchy-feely and not very scientific.

And that’s okay. Post frequency is no predictor of quality. One of my favorite blogs is curated by Dave, AA7EE, an artist constructing and restoring radio equipment that he chronicles online. But it’s a painstakingly meticulous process that results in much less frequent updates. Each of his posts includes photos and descriptions that capture the joy of hobby electronics in a way only a purist can. His ravenous readers, including me, can’t wait to devour the next project on his plate.

From another ham blogger comes a post that has become one of my recent favorites. In The Curious Challenge of FFMA Ron, VE3VN included several important details on a subject I knew little about (Fred Fish Memorial Award). I learned several somethings reading his post. Plus, he shared various nuggets of wisdom that provided illumination about that specific chase that I found refreshing and applicable elsewhere:

FFMA is one of those awards where you must work every entity. This is like reaching the top of the Honor Roll, a clean sweep in the Sweepstakes contest, all zones in CQ WW, or all counties in a QSO party… I have the needed (grid) list from one friend who is moderately serious about FFMA. If I hear what appears to be a rare grid I’ll check his list and contact him. He’s whittled down the number of remaining grids this way, moving him a few steps closer. I hope that he is eventually successful. The list isn’t long yet it will take him years to get there, if at all. You have to enjoy the chase since few reach the finish line… For everyone chasing FFMA or similar difficult awards, I salute you and sincerely wish you the best of luck. But I won’t join you in the chase…

Being a grizzled old storyteller whose ‘expires by’ date has long ago come and gone, I don’t know what I can still bring to the party. But at least I can continue pointing out and linking to other writers whose work I find scintillating. That is, after all, why we call it the web, right?