Whither blog?

Posted at 20:44 on 22 March 2007

I’ve been wondering a bit recently about what to do with my blog. I’ve been finding that there are quite a lot of demands on my time at the moment and it’s getting increasingly difficult for me to find the time to come up with good quality content that can keep my readers informed and entertained. I’d also like to use what free time I have to do things that don’t involve sitting over a computer — perhaps getting back into playing the piano again, for example, or improving my social life, or getting some much needed exercise.

Unfortunately this means that I haven’t had as much time for my personal code projects outside of work as I would have liked. I was hoping to spend some more time on my Comment Timeout plugin and perhaps have a go at writing an improved comment administration interface for WordPress, but I simply haven’t managed to find the time. I’ve also not been able to get anywhere near as far with Ruby on Rails as I’d have liked either. I stopped editing Wikipedia a few weeks ago for this reason, and I’ve been wondering too whether I should be cutting back on how much time I spend on my blog.

I’m also a bit concerned in case I’m getting too personal with what I’m writing. I’m very much the kind of person who hates being at the centre of attention, and I don’t like being too personal, especially when anyone and everyone can read what I have to say. Besides, as Jakob Nielsen points out, the chances are that what you write in your blog today can end up being read by your future boss in ten years’ time. Scary.

Nonetheless, I’ll probably continue blogging for the foreseeable future, though how regularly remains to be seen. I don’t want to end up feeling that I have to post something every week, or that I have to reply to every comment that everybody leaves here, though now that people are starting to leave comments and my Technorati rank is into five figures, I’m aware that there is more pressure in that respect. But in the meantime, if I get a bit slow off the mark responding to comments, or my posting frequency becomes a bit sporadic, don’t worry: I am still around — the fact of the matter is that I just can’t afford to spare a great deal of time on it at the moment.

I may eventually move my website away from blog format altogether, and towards something a bit more structured. Some things that I’ve written would be better off as static articles rather than as blog posts — for example, it might be good to consolidate my entries on ergonomic keyboards into one article outlining what I think of the concept and giving some links to helpful resources. I think it would also help to stand me out from the crowd a bit: now that everyone is blogging, having a personal website that isn’t in blog format does tend to have that kind of effect, and if you can make it look like it doesn’t have a content management system behind the scenes without compromising your sense of design, so much the better.