Taking Stock

I've been reading my own blog for the last few days. Not because I am convinced it is the most insightful, best written blog on the planet, but because I find it valuable to go back over what I have written. I made it through about the last two and half years of the archives and as usual, learned a few things along the way.

First. I have a lot of images to re-link since moving from Moveable Type to Minx. I've been doing them bit by bit as image searches pop up in the referrer logs, but that isn't good enough. I need to go into the directory where I put all of the old images and start at the top and do a few every day.

When I get that done, I need to start going through old posts and re-building internal links. Then everything will work.

Second. I have learned that in the entire time I have been blogging, since August 2003, there has been virtually no improvement in my typing or proofreading skills. I use the preview a lot and try to read everything carefully. And I use spell check. But almost invariably after hitting the post button, if I go and read a post on the actual blog. I will find errors. Words left out. The wrong word used but spelled correctly. I go back and fix them. and if I read the post a week or two latter. I'll find more.

Third: I really don't post as often as I used to. One of the reasons is that I rarely post at work anymore. There was ever an issue with that, it’s just that I don't usually have the time. I make my living as a graphic designer in an in-house corporate art department. I'm responsible for trade advertising, sales communications, promotions, and internal corporate projects. The last few years I have averaged 200 individual projects for the year. This year I'm well past 300 and will probably end the year closer to 400. Yes, I've been busy.

Another reason is that I'm spending more time reading other blogs. I used to have a list of about a twenty blogs and fifteen news sources. I've actually lost a few of the news sources and added blogs. A lot of blogs. I spend my time reading about things I might have written about. By the time I sit down with the time to write, I can't help but feel that it's all been done.

I blame a lot of good writers for this! And Apple. When they added an RSS reader to Safari it became easier to add bookmarks to the list and read more blogs.

Fourth: Somewhere along the way I started to become increasingly negative. As I was reading I kept wondering when did I become such a pessimist. When did I become so angry?

When I started blogging it was about learning something about the world and myself. There were stories where I actually researched things. Posts where I did my best to make sense of things that I didn't fully understand. (including myself!) Yes, I wrote my share of rants. But the older ones seem more reasoned, more thoughtful.

More recent posts seem to fall into the Insta-Rant category. The kind where you read a news story, find one or two good sentences to quote or shred and dash off a few quick paragraphs on auto-pilot. I know there have been times when I have gone out looking for a story to do just that.

It feels as though I am no longer writing from the belief, however misguided it may have been, that I have something of interest to say, but just to put something out there. Even worse it seems that rather than writing for what I have to say, I have fallen into writing to get a reaction. (That comments are so few and far between is just one aspect of the stupidity of that!)

The sum of my learning from reading through my own blog, is that I don't write as much as I used to; I'm still a lousy typist and proof reader, and a lot of I've written, particularly over the last year, I don't even like.

Someone once said, or maybe no one has ever said, “Unapplied knowledge is useless trivia.” So great, I've learned all that about my blog, and myself. What am I going to do with the knowledge?

First, I'm going to try to write more. I 'm hoping that all the extra practice will help my typing and proof reading! I'm also going to try to build a pause into the process. Allow a little time to pass between the typing and the reading. Hopefully this will help me to catch more of the errors because I'll be less likely to fill in the blanks as I'm reading.

I'm going to read fewer blogs. I'm going to go through the RSS feeds I have bookmarked and eliminate at least half. This is not going to be easy. The blogs are all on the list because I like them. If yours is one of the blogs cut from the list, and you will never know, please do not take it personally. It’s not you, its me.

I'm going to go back to reading more straight news sources. I'm going to add some ones I've never had before. I'm going to find some new things.

I don't think there is much that I can do about having the time to post at work! I need the job so I have to give their projects top priority while I'm on the clock.

As for the creeping dinge of anger and pessimism, I'm going to have to fight hard against that one. In his most recent post, Bill Whittle described some online communities this way:

There are endless small holes where cynicism and untrammeled pessimism are the coin of the realm, where mastery of snark and bile are held in high esteem.

I think the same applies to the real world as well. And sometimes the easiest path through life is down one of those holes. That's not the way I want to go. That's not the way I want to be. And it not what I want this site to be.

In one of the earlier navel gazing posts I wrote after reading my much shorter at the time archives, I divided posts into two broad categories. “Things That Amuse Me” and “Things That Piss Me Off.” In addition to trying to focus a little more on the first and a lot less on the second, I'm going to add a third: “I Find This Interesting.”

For those few of you who have kept coming back to this site as it began to slide down one of those little holes, my apologies and my thanks. It’s going to get better.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 10:30 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment