My original Salon blog circa 2004I started Real Live Preacher in December of 2002 in the old Salon blog community, now virtually defunct. Salon hasn't allowed new blogs in years. You can still see the old statistics from the heyday of our old community. I was anonymous for the first 18 months or so. I was honored and fortunate to draw the attention of an acquisition editor for Eerdmans, and they published a book of my essays in 2004.

RLP came along fairly early in the blogging phenomenon. I began to attract some decent traffic. The comments became their own conversation as people argued and discussed things. It was a fun time.

As the years have passed, I've slowed down a bit. I write professionally now, so I don't have the same amount of energy as I did back then. And blogs have changed too. The days of dozens and dozens of comments on every post have passed. People read many more blogs now and are less inclined to stick around and comment. The advent of aggregator readers makes commenting even rarer. Or maybe the comments just ran their course here. Who knows?

But I'm still here. I still post at RLP a couple of times a week. I still have no real goals except to write as well as I can.

Gordon Atkinson - Real Live Preacher