
Here we go again… December is Blog-Every-Day Month. No guidelines. No rules. No set topic. No nothing no how. Just an article with at least one complete sentence, every day…
December 29 …because I’ve been busy re-re-re-branding.
Oh great. Another blog post about blogging.
If you’ve been paying attention over the last month you may have noticed some of the changes I’ve made to this blog. If not, go look now… I’ll wait.
No really.
See, I’ve been writing online for what will be fifteen years in 2016. Fifteen freaking years! With nearly four thousand posts across 1.2 million words in about 60 categories. Yeah. That’s a lot of blogging across a very long time. Blaaaahhhhhgggghhhhghgh!
For those who have been playing along across more than a couple of those years you know: this blog has grown, changed, hibernated, reloaded, refreshed, updated, spread thinner, become increasingly irrelevant, and ultimately become a pointed if almost invisible commentary on the state of the internet in the second decade of the twenty-first century written by a guy who was in his mid-twenties when he started and is now –gulp– approaching 40.
Shit.
It is what it is, I guess.
Now some of you fine reader people also know (or maybe not) that I’ve often spread my blogging effort across numerous platforms and various concepts in the past. There have been times when I’ve thrown my hands skyward and in frustration attempted to pull them all together into something coherent or more useful only to have puttered and staggered. Yet, here I am again, over and through the past month I have been doing some reflecting on what I’m doing here online, poking the internet bear, testing my luck with the webz and stuff, and attempting to figure out why I’m doing it… Hint: I still don’t know. It’s just writing after all. It’s just me dribbling words onto the digital page and for some of you fine folks it’s just me blathering away being me, and you’re probably fitting into the category of either mildly annoyed or vaguely indifferent. I get that.
Spreading my efforts across a number of blogs is no longer working for me. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of frustration. And there has never really been any payoff. It’s just me spitting out blathering pages of text for no money or no purpose other than self-indulgent free-form publication. It’s tough sometimes. It’s rewarding and cathartic other times. So I keep at it. You read. Or not. I don’t even know anymore to be honest. I just keep typing and hitting the publish button and… well… that’s all really.
Thus, as I enter 2016 and stare down the barrel of this blog’s fifteenth anniversary in April, I’m moving towards a new goal for a new year: one blog. Everything in one spot. And with that move to everything in one spot, hopefully a freeing up of some vital and dwindling mental resources for other bits of content: more videos, more fiction, more focus on ideas rather than blathering about blather and maintaining the technical side of more blogs than I have fingers.
Oh, and maybe I’ll be able to try some new things, too. Wink wink…
Either way, I know that despite the fact that blogging is becoming the internet equivalent of something old people do, and while everyone else is trying to turn all human communication into a string of emoji and selfies, I’m going to double down on my old fashioned words and keep writing, make this site bigger and stronger and better, and… and perhaps we’ll see what a fifteen year old blog is capable of in 2016.