Where To Go From Here

This morning started out like any other… waking up waaaay too early to get ready for work and get my kids ready for school. With the house still silent I fired up the ol’ Internets and checked what was happening on Twitter. “A new post on CatholicGuyShow.com”, I said to myself with delight. So I clicked on it.

And I was stunned.

And within seconds… before even reading what dustin had to say… I knew exactly where they were coming from. Because for months I had been agonizing over what to do with LinoRulli.net.

I posted a whopping 24 times for all of 2011… and only five of those posts came during the latter half of the year. (In contrast, the site’s corresponding Twitter account has been far more active, with nearly 250 followers and over 500 tweets.) Most things that I used to post I can now broadcast more effectively over Twitter, and I simply haven’t had the time or inclination to post clips from the show or more in-depth thoughts that necessitate a full-fledged blog post. Life for me has changed a lot in the past three years.

Additionally, Lino has gotten his social media act together. When I started this site in 2008, Lino was still relatively new to Facebook and wasn’t even on Twitter yet. Now he tweets multiple times a day and responds to just about everyone who posts to his Facebook wall. The off-the-air conversation between Lino and his fans used to be facilitated by sites like this and CatholicGuyShow.com, but now the conversation is directly with Lino… which has started to make sites like these obsolete.

So last month with the domain renewal for LinoRulli.net coming due, I seriously considered pulling the plug. But I had also been toying with ideas for making the site worth reading again, and after doing many trial runs offline to see if I could make it work I launched an effort earlier this month to summarize each show and give it a grade. While reading a summary is no substitute for listening to the show, it gives people who can’t listen for whatever reason a sense of what went on that day so that they’ll be in the know. And the show highs and lows are there to give a little context as to how the show felt listening to it.

So I’ll see how it goes. It’s been a labor of love so far, but if external forces keep me from doing a good job on this, I’ll likely hang up the site for good.

Which brings me back to the winding down of CatholicGuyShow.com. To dustin, Alli, Elaine, LaJuan, and all of the other awesome people who have contributed to the blog throughout the years: thanks for the memories. The Official UnOfficial Lino Rulli Fan Club has been around almost as long as the show itself, and this wild ride wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun without your site leading the way. I’ll miss it immensely, and will try to keep the fan presence going on the Internets in my own small way.

God bless,

Steven