Reflecting on Matters of Interest

by Drew Kaplan · September 9, 2019

I had a good run with this website between the births of my third and fourth children. Having come off of a six-month project of my first intentionally public-facing blog, I then closed it down and created this website. I greatly enjoyed this endeavor, but the birth of my fourth child caused some disarray in my life and I wasn’t able to return to the attention, time, and vigor to dedicate to this website as I had before my fourth child was born.

The amount of posts averaged 40 per quarter in this website’s first 7 quarters

Decreased Posting Frequency Reflects Lack of Attention to This Website
From this blog’s creation and its first seven quarters, I was able to post an average of 40 posts per quarter, or more than 13 per month (or about 3 posts per week), which took some serious time and attention. However, following the birth of my fourth child, I was only able to get in 22 posts for the remainder of 2016, with only a combined 34 posts in 2017, 2018, and now 2019 (not including this post).

While the primary reason to attribute to this lack of content production on this website was my son’s birth and the attention needed at home, I also became busy with other things.

While I have been steadily writing about beer elsewhere, I have also become more attuned to the need to write on a particularly focussed topic. I already noticed this struggle early in 2016 and, while I created other blogs, it greatly diluted my ability to give attention to any one in particular, especially this blog. That struggle manifested in my inability to decide where to post something or not to post much of anything here.

Having begun to reflect more on the power of focussing on one given topic on a website, such as with my Star Wars blog, having this much of a generalist website is not where my energies will continue to be invested.

Top Ten Most-Popular Posts
In considering the most popular posts, by far, the absolute most visited post has been When Does One Become a Jewish Adult? A View from the Torah, likely due to its uncommon argument that the Torah regards Jewish adulthood to begin at 20 (and not at 13). Following that, the next two most popular posts concerned Firefly: The Game: Breakdown of Total Crew, Supply, Gear, and More Considering Expansions for Firefly: The Game and Ships as Firefly Game Boosters: Considering Jetwash, Artful Dodger, and Esmeralda, perhaps due to both the game’s popularity, as well as the dearth of other such content dealing with this game.

Posts about Firefly The Game were amongst the most-popular posts on Matters of Interest

Here is the full top ten most-visited posts of this website (as of this writing):

The two posts on that list discussing Android and location were my most popular posts early on, considering as they were posted in the first few months of this website. Nearly half of these top ten posts concerned Firefly: The Game, which, as I mentioned above largely probably were due to a lack of good discussion about these elements of this board game elsewhere online, yet it was something I was able to provide here. And the other posts concerned various Jewish matters, whether of a more textual nature or news.

Some Takeaways
I have a lot to be thankful for in my time working on Matters of Interest, especially through the many press passes I was able to land myself. While I had gotten a press pass while writing for Drew’s Views, that then led to my gaining many press passes in my writing for Matters of Interest, especially in 2015, as well as some in 2016. These press passes allowed me to experience many things I would not have otherwise experienced, including attending coffee and tea events, as well as exposing me to comic conventions of one sort or another. Included in these experiences were also meeting a variety of people from various walks of life that I most certainly would not have encountered. I was greatly enriched on a personal level through these experiences.

I also grew significantly as a writer throughout this time and not just on account of writing a lot. One way in which this occurred was both through reading good writing out there (including The New Yorker), but also through simply self-conceptualizing myself as more of a writer, per se, especially when composing articles from attending events on a press pass. This taking myself more seriously caused me to elevate my writing.

Another way occurred through experiencing press releases. While I was thrown into the fire in composing a handful of press releases for BierBuzz events, I also received press releases and gained a familiarity with them through this process. It has been fascinating learning about and familiarizing myself with that literary genre.

What’s Next?
My blogging adventures continue.

While I remain writing for BierBuzz (will blog for beer), I launched Textual Insights this year as a place to deposit my various Jewish textual writings, I still write about Star Wars at Star Wars Maven, and, oddly enough, may be returning to focus more on my personal blog, which has received a huge drop-off in my attention since creating both Drew’s Views, as well as this blog. And I have other writing endeavors, including doing some freelance work.

How my writing continues to develop and what is in-store for me is an exciting future that I am looking forward to. And I have Matters of Interest to thank for it.

Thank you for visiting and reading 🙂

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