So here I am with my very first post on my brand new weblog.
Ok, then.
Now I just need to think of something to say.
I’ve had a website of my own for a while, but in the last six months I’ve barely touched it. Partly this is laziness, but it’s also due to the complexity of maintaining a website: you have to edit pages on your computer, make sure they’re all linked together, publish them to the web – it’s pretty time- and energy consuming.
So – a friend of mine recently established his own blog (A Can of Words) and it prompted me to think about whether I should jump on the bandwagon and ride this new telecommunicative wave. The minuses of doing so are that you have less control over your pages, that a blog has, perhaps, less prestige than a website and that it’s just more satisfying to do something yourself rather than rely on an off-the-shelf product. But on the other hand it’s quicker and easier to maintain, there’s less you have to think about and you’re not tied down to using a computer with a web design program and all your files on. And anyway, if I decide I don’t like it, I can always delete it.
Another, less direct, obstacle to having a blog is the vague guilt I’ll have over the idea that I’ve put my blog out there for people to look at, but, without a very good reason, I wouldn’t spend much time reading other people’s weblogs. I suppose the only answer to that is ‘Oh, well.’ The only blogs that I frequent are Miss Snark‘s – and that isn’t nearly as diaristic and amorphous as most people’s seem to be (and if diaristic isn’t a word, it should be) – and Robert Jordan’s on Dragonmount and George R R Martin‘s – and they’re rarely updated. Also Stephen R Donaldson‘s Gradual Interview. I’m not even that keen on discussion fora (yes, I will use that as a plural form), though I do contribute a little to Bath Spa Writers, a group I set up when I was at university.
In fact, I’m reading a lot more on the internet these days – more than I used to. The reason for this is that I have a job that involves little actual work. Not as good as it sounds. But I have all this time to do something constructive, so here is my construction.
Captain Maybe 