OK. I read a lot of blogs. I’ve been thinking about starting one for months. I have lots of ideas written down for topics I would like to write about. I have books filled with little Post-It note bookmarks to help me remember important spots I wanted to mention. I think about it a lot, but I have yet to actually start it after nearly 2 years. Why? Oh let me count the ways…
1. I’m afraid to let my thoughts be made public. Some of it is fear of being flamed, but I think I can handle that. Specifically, I fear destroying future job prospects. The field I work in is filled with people that are explicitly anti-Christian. I guess I try to transcend that at the workplace by not being very opinionated about anything. Nonetheless, I have a whole stack of horror stories from places like The Chronicle for Higher Education where a person’s blog got them fired or passed over. I’m not talking about the obvious things like flaming your co-workers online and then reaping the consequences. Those people deserve exactly what they get for letting their tongue slip. I’m talking about more subtle things like political persuasion, religion, etc. So I’m pretty sure I’ll have to always use a pseudonym. The goal isn’t to achieve anonymity’s, but to discourage casual readers from figuring things out without any work at all. I don’t want this to come up if you Google my name.
2. Writing is hard work. I love to read good blogs. I hate reading bad ones. In fact, I don’t read them! I don’t want to post anything that sucks, but that means a lot of time and thought to invest in it. As if I didn’t have plenty of other things to be doing in the meantime, like the dishes. One of my favorite quotes about writing is from Mark Twain: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.” Bad writing is often disguised as long-winded writing. I don’t just want to blah blah blah, I want to say something significant. With every post! Sound too ideal? Yes, I’m sure it is.
3. Software. I’m a programmer. I don’t want to use some prefab blog like LiveJournal, BlogSpot or WordPress, etc. I don’t even want to install an engine on my own hosted site. I want to write a full-featured blog from scratch using Ruby on Rails and Scriptaculous with integrated load balancing and validation in FireFox, IE, Safari, and Konqueror! With a plan like that, I would spend the next year writing code and not actually make a single post!
4. I’m not sure whether to stick to one topic or post on a smattering of interests. Some possible topics? All the wise people out there say that a successful blog should stick with one topic. If you want to write about more than one thing, you should probably have multiple blogs. Nobody cares about your personal little eclectic grotto. I want to do this eventually, but remember this blog here is just to break the cycle of procrastination.
Speaking of how Blogs should be written… A lot of people say that lists are good. Use lots of lists. Here are 10 reasons why you should use lists, etc. OK. So what will I be posting on? Without further ado…
Christian Theology
More specifically…
Ecumenicalism (Church unity)
Christian Mysticism (Along the lines of St. John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence, Thomas Merton, etc.)
My journey from Baptist to Charismatic to partially Reformed to “More confused but more certain”.
Quotes, book excerpts and commentary from authors and speakers I have enjoyed (Larry Crabb, C.S. Lewis, Peter Leithart, could go on and on.)
Music
More specifically…
Classical guitar
Celtic Music
Celtic guitar (of course!) As typified by Pierre Bensusan, Steve Baugman, James Kline, etc.)
Renaissance Lute
Trance techno (Ha! Topic whiplash!)
Music pedagogy
Web application development
More specifically…
My journey from ASP.NET (C#) and MSSQL to Ruby on Rails and MySQL. (Lots to cover here.)
A place to keep a list of by favorite code snippets.
Miscellaneous musings.
Well, that’s all for now. I’m getting tired and my son (who has been on my lap the entire time) keeps falling asleep on me. He thinks blogging is boring. I guess I will sign off for now!