Havasimy

And so it begins. Again.

First a recap of my blog exploits. I got my first website in college. The year was 1994, give or take a year. Coding HTML was done by hand, so it took time to make changes. Thus, the site rarely got changed. It was mainly a collection of quotes and links. I mainly used it as a bookmark list I could access on any computer. When college ended, I was locked out of my account so I couldn't edit or delete the website. It took a while for them to delete the account, though. So for atleast six months, I was able to see my website but not change it. Luckily, there was nothing offensive on the site.

I went website-less for about six year. Then I started dating a girl with a blog. She gave me access to write on it. After using that access mainly to make smart-ass comments about her posts, she said I had better get my own blog. That blog, which I guess is really this blog, went five years with me making atleast one post each month.

That streak ended in 2008, but really I really stopped posting regularly in years earlier. When I got laid off from my job in Uniontown, I didn't have internet in my apartment so the only time I could post would be when I went to the library or some other place with public net access. I would be laid off for seven months. It was July 2008 before I had an apartment with net access, and by that time I was living in Camden, NJ. I still didn't post regularly because I had a monster desktop that I had bought to be good for gaming, but when I wasn't playing games, I didn't feel like sitting at my desk.

By the time I got a laptop from work two years later and wifi set up in my place, I had lost any real interest in blogging. Besides, the only people who read my blog at that point were friends who occasionally read it. By the time they did, I'd usually had told them everything directly.

And then there was the fact that it usually took me over an hour to make a post because I would write it, then reread it multiple times. As a writer, I write like a coder. But as a editor of my own work, I was too much a perfectionist.

Then last fall I decided to start blogging again. One turning point was a magazine article, I believe it was Pittsburgh Magazine, about the burgh blog and the anonymous blogger PittGirl, who has since started blogging at thatschurch.com under her real name. That article both made me want to start blogging again and gave me ideas to improve my writing/blogging process to the point where I would actually have a shot at posting regularly. Also, at the time I was getting into social media like Myspace and Plurk, which put me in contact with other bloggers. Getting into discussions with them made me want a place to post my longer form opinions.

But I was in the process of packing up my Camden apartment of over four years to move to Delaware. So I decided to wait til after the move and my life settled down. So I survived the move, but my life never settled down. At work, things got hectic as it was obvious that work needed to get done to avoid there being layoffs. Also, I scored tickets to not only the Steelers/Chargers playoff games, but also the Super Bowl. By the time, my life started getting back on track in mid-March of this year, the news of layoffs came down. So I spent the next few months trying to find a job. I found one back in the Pittsburgh area, so for the second time in seven months, I moved to a different state. So as I was starting a new job, where my first project was a project from hell, I was living at my parents, which meant no personal internet access and a 2 hour daily commute, and also driving back to Delaware every weekend, which is a ten-plus hour round trip drive. I completed the move, but the project at work was still killing me, so I decided I would restart the blog on Thanksgiving weekend. I figured I'd have more time than a regular weekend. it's not working out that way, but if I'm going to start blogging again, I'm going to have to start fitting it in.

Now what makes me think I'm going to have a better chance to keep the blogging up than I did before. Here are what's different now that has me believing I have a chance.

First of all, laptops and wifi. I never had wifi in my apartment when I was seriously blogging. So I was stuck to my desk while writing. Not anymore. Last year, I started getting a little into baking. Now I can sit in my kitchen and write while waiting for something to finish cooking. And since one of my computer is a mini netbook, I can easily write from anywhere and thanks to the prevalence of public wifi, I can post my writing even if I don't feel like being stuck in my apartment. Right now, I'm writing this in the new Panera Bread at Settler's Ridge. If I was still in New Jersey, I'm sure I would get plenty of writing done watching Pirates game at my hangout there.

Second of all, I mentioned that my old blog was mainly read by my friends. Now I plan on posting links to new entries to other social media like Plurk (think Twitter). So hopefully I'll get outside readers from there. This should make for better comments on my entries as well as keep me from using the "what's the point? noone's reading it" excuse for not writing.

Third of all, I mentioned the article about PittGirl. In it, she mentioned how fast she writes the entries. It made me realize that I need to shorten my time to create entries. So from now on, I'm going to write like I talk. Those who know me know I tend to talk stream-of-consciousnessly. I go off on tangents and then come back to my original point. When I'm trying to make a point, I often forgo grammar or real words in favor of communicating what I want to communicate. So I will try this in my writing. For those English major friends of mine, please don't point out grammar errors or misspelling. If I'm spending an hour on each post making sure every sentence is grammatically corrects and makes snese on its own, then I won't be keeping up the blogging for long. Feel free to correct factual errors. I'll try to fact-check posts as well as I can, but I'm not a newspaper reporter. It won't be completely thorough and I will make mistakes.

Finally, on Plurk, as on Twitter, entries are limited to 140 characters. My mind isn't made for 140 character messages, so I often will have my messages be broken up into 10 or more chunks of 140 characters. When I wrote those messages, I always thought that they would be perfect for a blog entries. So in alot of cases, it's not like I'm starting the blog from a dead stop. Alot of these entries will be posts that I've been writing on plurk, only now in a more appropriate place.

So feel free to comment. I'm concentrating on content at first, so forgive the boring template and, what I'm sure are, broken links on the side.

I'm aiming for at least two posts a week. If you don't see one in a while, feel free to comment or write me telling me to get off my ass. Enjoy.

And thanks.