My Blog

I've been blogging for 12 years, off and on. I started my first blog within a few weeks of going online, in 1998, and I blogged nearly every day for the next six months. It was like a diary and yet not a diary and I was feeling my way around the newness of it all... one of only a handful of UK blogs at a time when the majority of websites and online journals were American.

A few years ago, I realised that the subjects I blogged about fell under certain headings, reflecting my interests... home education, genealogy, Second Life, Quakers. I realised that the people I knew in home education would probably not be interested in my Second Life material, and those who were genealogists were probably not interested in Quakers etc. So I split my blogging between different blogs, one for each subject.

The trouble is, I'm busy doing all those things plus trying to earn money, and so I don't have that much time to write for my own enjoyment, and so I tended only to blog once every few days. That meant that all my blogs looked sluggish and uncared for, and it was an effort to maintain them and to maintain a train of thought with any coherence. So a few weeks ago I decided to maintain this blog as my main blog, and to blog about whatever took my fancy.

I've been wavering about my decision ever since for the good reasons that I feel that my interests are quite separate... but I am continuing with it for the time being. I've decided to try to label my posts more systematically, so that it will (hopefully) be possible for someone to subscribe and see at once whether the current post will be of any interest to them.

I don't often get feedback except in Japanese or Chinese... and I tend to delete those comments because I don't know what they say.

Life has been a bit stressful and difficult over the past few weeks, and I have wanted to blog about things, but I always bear in mind that when I blog, it isn't just my life I am blogging, but the lives of those nearest and dearest to me. I'm in a bit of a bind, because to blog the way I'd like to blog, I would share things about other people and what they do, which I can only do safely if I anonymise the blog... but if I did that, set one up so that I could talk freely without breaking out details of other people's lives, I would have to keep off the unique collection of interests that I blog about, or be fairly quickly recognisable.

So. I've decided that I'll continue with this random blog for three months and see where it takes me. Feedback welcome.