I've been spending some time the last few days reading my own blog. On the surface this probably sounds only slightly better than spending an afternoon Googling yourself, but I see it as a valuable exercise. It helps me to understand where the site is actually going compared to where I wanted to to go when I started.

I have noticed a couple of things I am going to have to try to fix. The content seems to be suffering the side effects of a couple of periphery obsessions. Specifically, the little calendar at the top of the sidebar and readership statistics. (I can't blame the last one solely on SiteMeter any more since since I now have stats from five different sources)

The effect of the calendar is the occassional pointless post like this one. It has this effect because any day that I don't post something, the date stays grey. If I post, the number turns blue. A grey day in the middle of a month full of blue days is like a huge zit in the end of my nose the day of a big meeting. I really need to get over that. This month I am four days away from what may be the first month of blue days in the short history of Hold The Mayo. I will post something on each of those days, and some of may be complete crap just to have a blue month. After that, I will not post for the calendar. I will post when I have something to post. Which from looking back on the days before I had the calendar thing was pretty close to every day anyway.

The effect of readership statistics is more subtle. I find myself occasionally taking intellectual shortcuts and not putting the effort of thought into topics that they deserve. And I have at times drifted between but Den Beste calls Linkers and Thinkers. I started this blog with the intention of being a thinker.

This was brought into sharper focus yesterday when I wrote a post about the U.N. and its efforts to gain control over certain aspects of internet technology. When I reading it, I thought - this is a more serious post I should put it at eTalkinghead. This thought bothered me because it is the kind of post I started this site for. There are clearly things here that don't belong there, but there should be nothing there that doesn't belong here.

This does not mean that I think every post has be written in an attempt to change the world. I had great fun chronicling my attempts to score a cheap iPod on Ebay. But I do think Hold The Mayo has become more "bloggy" than I originally wanted it to be.

In an earlier round of blog navel gazing I grouped by posts into to basic categories: This Amuses Me, and This Pisses Me Off. Looking at the State of the Mayonnaise now, I would have to ad, This Takes Up Space.

After I fill up the rest of the space of this month, this catgegory goes away. Space is not a bad thing to have. It is room to think.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 08:39 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment