I really appreciate the feedback on my Split Personality post. I got some good comments via a wide variety of channels, which kind of made me realize that really, I’m way the heck overthinking it and it’s okay to have some level of crossover.
I decided as a part of the process of figuring out what to do in moving forward, I’d look back. That’s when I read over all 688 posts I’d written on this blog. A few things stuck out at me:
- I was way oversharing things, especially in those first few years
- It was often way too wall-of-texty over mundane stuff
- No, seriously, overshare ahoy
- It’s funny to see how much tech has evolved in the ten years I’ve been running this thing
- Several posts were little one-off throwaways that are now tweets or Facebook posts
- There was way too much discussion about posting or lack of posting or other meta crap that meant something to me but is relatively meaningless to everyone else (in a sense, much like this post)
Of those 688, I wound up hiding 584 of them. I’m causing some massive linkrot in the process, but I tried to keep things that I felt had some sort of enduring value. Whether they’re reflective of me in some way or discussing personal events that still feel like there’s worth in sharing, anything publicly visible at this point is something that I still feel holds some level of value.
I also brought over three of the five posts from my brianarn@github experiment. It was fun and I enjoyed writing the content, but for as interesting of a concept as it is, Octopress requires a bit more time and effort than I really have to play with right now. WordPress is just kind of solid out of the box, especially in later versions, so it works for now.
For a variety of reasons, I cherish some of the overshare stuff because it’s been of real value to reflect lately. Some things in those posts are wonderful from a personal journaling perspective, but serve no reason to be public on the ‘net, so it’s worth closing down a little bit.
All that being said, I feel like I have a better idea of how I want to move forward. Personal and technical thoughts will be intermingled here on RandomThink, and I’ll stick with WordPress because while Octopress was neat, it’s still a bit more fiddly than I’d like to have to mess with for writing. I’m going to be trying to write about more technical topics because I feel those have more value in a public form.
For more ephemeral thoughts – links, memes, etc – I’ll stick with Twitter and Facebook – in particular, as I’ve been doing lately, baby-related things will likely wind up on Facebook, so if you’re interested in that aspect, hit me up with a friend request.
I also think I’m going to start a personal journal, so I have a place to write all those things I’ve recently enjoyed reading but were way too personal and oversharing.
Here’s looking forward to, y’know, actually blogging about something other than blogging.