For nearly a week, I had lost access to a number of entries and could not log in to the Blogger service. This just happened to co-incide with recent misgivings I’ve had about the very idea of publishing my thoughts to a worldwide audience, and I thought that perhaps, it was time to say goodbye. It wasn’t the Blogger technical issues that would have put me off; it’s against my nature to give up on something because of a technical issue. But I often wondered whether Irrelevant Opinions was making me a better person in any way. It succeeded in reviving my passion for writing after my many years of engineering studies, but having met that goal, I wondered if there was anything else I wanted from it. I couldn’t think of anything.

Strangely, however, I missed it during the brief absence. Even though I will often go over a week without writing anything, I felt like something was missing by the fact that I couldn’t write anything here even if I wanted to. In a certain way, this site and the handful of readers had become quite important to me. As someone who only sees his home for only a day or two per month, this site and the loyal readers provided a much needed permanency that my mobile lifestyle lacked.

This site was still collecting statistics during the downtime, and brought up some very interesting results. I typically get around 40-50 unique visitors per day, mostly in Canada, but there are some regular overseas readers as well. My referrers log showed that some of them were actually digging through my site using Google cache and the Wayback machine, salvaging posts that would otherwise have been lost. That dedication amazed me. In addition, I heard a great deal of protest at the idea of closing this down from family, friends, and strangers who find all this irrelevance somewhat relevant.

All that being said, I wouldn’t continue only because other people want me to; I would only continue if I want to myself. I haven’t fully decided.

I am satisfied with the content I’ve been able to put out thus far. A lot of other blogs are full of copy/paste work, teenage angst, and general nonsense. I’d like to think that IO is a little different.

Thanks to all my loyal readers thus far. We’ll see where things go from here.