I do seem to be feeling much better. I stopped posting in October only to begin again yesterday, and here I am posting again! I was browsing yesterday and today looking for configuration instructions for a plugin I installed in October and promptly forgot about. (More on this later when I actually use it to generate content.) I read an article about how to bring readers to one’s blog with an aim to make money blogging, and the author insisted that one’s blog have “focus.”
This blog, when I post to it, is just my personal weblog. Should it have focus? I suppose the real question is that if and when I begin to post regular entries to the blog, should it then have “focus”?
At any rate, I don’t know if I am necessarily a very focussed person. As Candide always said, “If this were the best of all possible worlds,” then I would post here 3 times a week or more. These posts would concern the following subjects:
- thoughts about current events in my life, school, 19th century English novels etc.
- book reviews (both scholarly and pleasure reading)
- movie/TV reviews
- board game reviews
- restaurant reviews (although this would be better applied if I still lived in N.O. or really anywhere but Monroe, LA)
- gadgets
- recipes (I really like food)
- knitting: projects, equipment, ideas, etc.
- Renaissance festivals
That’s a pretty hefty list. I have made a separate blog for recipes, but that’s because I had intended to use it somewhat as a database. I don’t know if it’s failing or not. There aren’t many entries in it, but that is because I get a lot of recipes from a friend of mine. Her recipes are handed down for several generations and she might not appreciate it if the recipes went public. I haven’t figured out what to do about that, if anything.
The other items on the list of blog content are all interests of mine. I thought about making a separate Ren Fest blog, but until I can attend a fest and then actually put the pictures up in my gallery, for starters, I don’t think I can maintain something like that. Of course it would help if I had my own camera. Still it would be cool to make a Ren Fest Blog - with articles, contributions from readers, photos and links! Might have to put that in a “list of things to do before I die.”
At any rate, my interests are pretty broad. I didn’t even put anything in about my pets - ferrets, a bird, some hermit crabs, and 3 betta fish - but that would qualify as an interest and I may one day write enough about pet-related issues to make a category for the posts.
I suppose I’ve rambled full circle here: the big question is whether I want a large audience of regular readers and/or to make money off of my weblog. Honestly, I’m not certain I want either of those things. I am already paranoid that something I say here might get me fired from a future job, or cause one of my very few friends start to hate me. Do I really need a bunch of people reading this thing? On the one hand, it would feed my ego, but on the other, it might just be trouble :P.
It also might be nice if (like last March) someone liked my review of a book/movie/board game enough to click on the Amazon link and buy it, but that’s just because I am a book junkie and need Amazon associates income to help feed my addiction. So perhaps I don’t really want to make money here, either.
Still, that makes me sound like I created my web presence just to take up webspace. That’s not particularly cool. I must be getting older - when I was young and idealistic, I believed in self-expression for its own sake. It was only after I hit my mid-twenties that I realized how tiresome self-expression for its own sake can really be. (See goth poetry websites that allow user submissions. Heck, see any goth poetry website…)
It is a testament to my lack of focus that I have rambled on for several paragraphs and still failed to decide if I need a focus here or not, much less what that focus should be. I do know one thing, though: I’m a decent writer with a fairly interesting viewpoint. If I posted here regularly and at least provided semi-interesting content, I could definitely provide an awesome procrastination tool. Who doesn’t love to procrastinate?
