In this blogging age (well, I might be a late bloomer) I have long anguished over where to keep my journal of the random thoughts that I have spread across several blogs. There are two conflicting issues that has driven my anguish:
- If anyone is following me on any of my blogs, then I do not want bore them with too much off-topic content.
- It is a pain to remember where to post what.
But, it turns out that I don’t blog consistently on any one topic—I’m kind of A.D.D. that way—and I don’t think anyone but my mom is reading this, anyway. I blog as an outlet to practice writing (your redlines happily accepted); with the practical side-effect of using the cloud to back up my memories. So, I have decided to consolidate. My future ramblings involving my sphere of interests will all happen here (except the startup/entrepreneurship and programming topics that I post on Cache Crew blog). Since I am using WordPress (blogging software), I can organize my interests by category and use tags to index postings. We will see how well this allows me keep the content organized, easy to follow, and simple to find. I plan to move the content from all my other personal blogs here as well, so I can find them all in one place.
My business partner at Cache Crew and Hand Things Down, Cheryl Marquez, has been trying to teach me about SEO and social-promotion (since she has been taking care of most of it, I haven’t had to). I will be experimenting and applying what she is learning to my practices.
Blogger.com, owned by Google, provides a quick and easy way to create your own blog while letting someone else run it. As Google puts a massive amount of resources into building up its Google+ social network, they will integrate blogging features and, likely, blogger.com itself. This could bring powerful public-izing of written content, potentially. This will be interesting to watch (and might have me rethinking whether to continue to blog here).
WordPress is powerful, easily customizable open-source software that manages blog content—so powerful, in fact, that it is commonly used to build entire web sites, scarcely recognizable as a blog. The folks behind the creation of the WordPress software also host the software for you at WordPress.com, allowing you to easily get a blog up and running (not unlike Blogger.com). It isn’t as flexible as hosting it yourself, but it is far easier to manage. There is a whole community of users and programmers that specialize in WordPress customization.
Do You Blog?
Do you blog? How to you solve the conflict between expressing the various dimensions of your thoughts while keeping your blog focused?
Resources:
- WordPress.com — A place to blog if you do not have a web host of your own.
- WordPress.org — The most popular software for running your own, self-hosted blog.
- Blogger.com and Blogspot.com — Google owned and run blog site. It’ll be interesting to see how much more powerful it might be once they integrate it into Google+.
Soon to be obsolete references, once they’re integrated here:
I keep anything vaguely technical in one place. I separate out my econ-geek interests into another, mostly because I have illusions that my keen technical insights (aka helpless flailing) will be some kind of asset career-wise. I’m guessing that my other writing might contain or imply political views, which I don’t want to foist onto those not interested and you never know what might count against you.
Both my blows are on Blogger, which I only half-heartedly like, but I’m too lazy to change.
thanks for these amazing links…