The State of the Blog III

I’ve written a few times now, primarily as a reminder to myself, that this blog is meant to be a wholly self-serving endeavour. The idea is that it lets me dump my thoughts out on the virtual page, and functions as a virtual archive that I can easily check in the future, so I can be reminded of old thoughts and feelings, and see my own progress. There’s been times when I’ve felt my rationale for writing here shift to one of writing for others' sake, and I’ve consciously resisted and pulled back to my original selfish reasoning.

Recently I’ve let go of the idea that I am the primary audience for this blog. Obviously I still think anyone who isn’t me who chooses to read it should find something better to do with their time, but if you really insist on reading what I write, I might as well try and make it worth your while. Getting the habit of journaling regularly was partly responsible for this shift in perspective, as that is a kind of stream-of-consciousness, pure honesty thought dump, which frees up the blog to be more considered, and to pick and choose what I’m honest about without feeling like I’m desperate to get anything off my chest.

In the process of migrating my site, I put a lot of effort into cleaning things up to make it something I’d be proud to show to a stranger as a first impression of me (or if not proud at least unembarrassed), and spent a decent amount of time trying to make the site SEO optimized. I am always conscious that the nature of having to write something every day means that 9 times out of 10, what I write isn’t going to be especially high quality, but I want to try and improve nonetheless.