Occasionally, there comes a time when you simply can’t write your blog. Sooner or later, the blog comes to an end, or goes a long hiatus. There are certainly any number of reasons you can’t get a post off (temporarily or permanently) and that’s certainly understandable.
It could be a family emergency, a machine failure, a long, well-deserved vacation, a lack of interest in the current topic, a dearth of information about your current topic, you switched domains, you simply can’t find the time - or you just plain don’t wanna do it anymore!
Any of the above reasons are fine, and don’t require a bit of justification. I’m sure there are plenty more I couldn’t come up with - point being, the reason doesn’t matter.
There’s a small problem though. You probably have a readership - and almost certainly have an RSS feed.
My suggestion is that if you know that your writing will become slow (or stop) then please - take the time to write a post (however short) that simply says something to that effect. It could be as simple as “Hi folks - sorry about the lack of posts - I don’t expect to be posting much in the near future” or as complex as you care to make it. You might explain the circumstances, or redirect people to your new shiny blog on a different topic (or subdomain) but in any case - say something. You don’t have to make any promises to write more, and you don’t need to make it up to anyone. Just say something.
Say anything.
This is far more helpful than you might think. It will certainly be of benefit to me, your readers will appreciate knowing what’s going on, and honestly you’ll probably feel a little bit better knowing that you took a sliver of time to keep everyone in the know - even if it’s one last time. Also, should you take blogging back up in the future, you may find that your act of courtesy ticks the wheel of internet karma to your advantage a bit, as you’ll be remembered more favorably by previous readers.
Thanks!
Dock — Another useful ploy for this: if you know it’s going to be, say, two weeks that you’ll have down-time, you can re-post “classics” that you’ve written before. Good candidates: posts that drew the most comments, posts from a year ago when you made predictions about something, posts that you thought had something really good in them but never caught on somehow.
Best is to pair this with an explanation such as you suggest: “Hey, folks, posting is going to be light for the next couple of weeks because of XYZ. I thought I’d use this chance to re-think some of my favorite posts from the past.” Then if you put a one-sentence lead-in for each of them - at least you’re giving the audience *something* to mull over.
This is a good post.
Sometimes I get to a blog which hasn’t had a new post for over a year, yet there’s no notification about it.
So..yeah..people should “say something”.
A lot of decor and design blogs whose authors are about to go on vacation or otherwise AWOL will have friends and other bloggers step-in as “guest blogger.” This is a great way to keep up your traffic and reward readers with fresh content.
WordPress has a useful feature to help with this if the blogger is just taking a vacation and expects to be back. When one goes to write a WP post, the post timestamp can be edited and set to any date. That way, a series of posts can be written but they’re not activated until date(s) chosen by the blogger. Very handy!
There’s another feature in WordPress which allow one to write “on the fly” and post via an e’mail address, but I haven’t had a need to try that feature yet and am not sure I’d want to write “on the fly,” as I like to write a post and then carefully scrutinize it for any bloopers before hitting the “publish” button.