Thursday, March 12, 2009

Is there a real astrologer on staff?

I've loved your site for many years, but this year I've noticed that the horoscopes are repeating. Is there a real astrologer on staff or have you moved more towards entertainment?

E


Thank you for writing. There is a real astrologer on staff, that's me :-). I do cast charts for the horoscopes. But after 4-5 years of writing horoscopes I find that the same patterns repeat themselves, and it is hard to come up with new ways of saying the same thing, and it takes a huge amount of time to write horoscopes on a daily basis. I have created a program that links up the day's energy pattern for the Moon together with interpretations written over the past few years, and it creates a database of horoscopes that pulls the right interpretation for that day's energy. I periodically add new interpretations to those files as time permits. It is rare that a horoscope repeats for the same sun-sign (about once every 2-3 years per sign, and then rarely in the same sign), and if you are seeing more than that, please let me know as there could be some error with my database.

Where it comes to horoscopes though, frankly ALL horoscopes are entertainment, I have never viewed them as more than that and have always encouraged our readers to do so as well. See: http://tinyurl.com/bjsunsigns.

Horoscopes are fun and entertaining, people enjoy them, but I expect no one to take them seriously, mine or anyone else's. Serious astrology is far more detailed and in-depth and while horoscopes do help fund Astrology.ca, Adsense is not bringing in a huge amount of money, and I have found most readers aren't interested in purchasing things from the site. So my payoff is really the enjoyment I get from producing the content. Automating the delivery has freed up a huge amount of time for me to redesign the site, and to bring in fresh new content and services to this and my other sites. I hope people enjoy the horoscopes, and that will bring people in to learn more about astrology for themselves. In the next while, as the new site continues to build, I hope to bring in more tutorials and lessons to help readers cast and read their own charts in detail.

One thing new that I am doing is the Astrology_ca account at Twitter. http://twitter.com/astrology_ca ... there I do daily interpretations of what is going on astrologically in the moment. I go there once or twice a day and those interpretations and comments are written daily on the fly. I also take questions and comments there and on my blog at http://astrologyca.blogspot.com/.