There are two primary schools of thought when it comes to blogging: the scientists and the artists.

Scientists plan. They strategize what keywords they want to use. They carefully craft their titles for maximimum SEO benefit. They choose keywords with great intent.

Then there are the artists who really don’t care about any of that stuff. They just want to move someone, or make them thing or connect with them in some way. A meaningful comment means more to them than a search ranking or increasing traffic to the site.

Most bloggers are not entirely in one camp or the other but every blogger leans to one side or the other. Some lean a lot. Some a little.

I have always resonated with the artist side and a little something dies inside me when I hear someone talk about blogging from a purely scientific approach.

For several years I’ve tried to do what I thought was the responsible thing: embrace the artist side but keep a healthy dose of the science. Therefore I had a content schedule. I had goals for how many posts I wanted to do each week and I even pushed myself further down this path earlier this year. I committed to do better in 2013. More science, I thought, would be good.

Except what’s happened is that as I approach my eighth year of blogging I’m feeling more constrained by my own rules. I have ideas that don’t have a home because they’re outside of the categories I’ve tried to create with this blog. My creativity (which is where the energy to do it comes from) has been slowly strangled by the very science I thought was going to reinvigorate the blog. In short, I built rules for this blog that I thought would help the blog grow but in reality it killed the very joy this blog has been to me in the past.

I’m not going to do that anymore. In fact, I’m going to try to throw off as many of the constraints I’ve created for the blog as I can.

So that means I’m not going to do Monday’s Stats posts anymore unless I happen to want to talk about a particular stat and it happens to be a Monday.

I’m not going to do a video of the week anymore though there will be videos and they may even come every week.

I’m going to break the rules of good blogging in order to find the joy of blogging and that means killing my content schedule and my approach to blog post titles and tagging and all the other stuff you’re supposed to do to blog well.

In the end I hope to rekindle that joy I had in the early years of blogging.  The elements of the blog science are always there within reach should I decide to consider them again but for now (and maybe forever) they will remain on the shelf. Here we go.