Learning to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog
Two years ago, I started a blog. It lasted three posts. I am not proud of this statistic.
I am feeling moderately motivated at the moment, so I'm going to give it another go. But before we talk of the future of this website, I want to fill you in on some its past.
rawksome.net v1
I have owned the rawksome.net domain for five years, and this most recent version was the third incarnation of a vague purpose. I originally purchased web hosting with the intention of hosting a shared blog or forum with some friends who were no longer going to be geographically near each other. Then Facebook happened, so it seemed considerably less relevant and never went anywhere.
rawksome.net v2
A few years later, inspired to do some "creative writing" or possibly just avoiding writing an essay, a second version burst forth. Rawksome.net v2 kept the personal-life ideal of v1, but was a more traditional blog in the sense that I assumed people would be invested in my daily life if I threw in a little rhetoric dazzle. It lasted exactly one post, which was lost due to a server error. I had really liked what I had written, and the loss of my brilliant opening remarks discouraged me from continuing. The website again went inactive.
rawksome.net v3
The third and theoretically final phase actually began to take shape much earlier than January 2010. The impending new decade nagged at my mind, and by December 2009 I had a working idea of how I wanted to proceed. Instead of something that amounted to not much more than a jazzed-up diary, I wanted something that had roots in journalism. I wanted to do research, to take things that interest me, things I thought were important, and make them relevant. I wanted to explain why things matter, and have an opinion that would carry weight because I knew what I was talking about. I had the framework laid out for maybe a year's worth of entries - no content yet, just structure. This turned out to be a poor choice.
After three posts that I would consider successful and interesting, I froze. I knew what the next post was supposed to be, but I did not have a clearly designated place for it in my hypothetical ideal structure. I hate when websites are sloppy, or change approaches. I had such a clear idea from before day one that I couldn't let go of my perfectly nested categories or carefully selected featured image for this one post. Struck with indecision, I couldn't skip it or fix it, and so once again my little corner of the web fell into disuse.
Wandering in the Wilderness
Despite an appearance of complete disuse, my project was far from forgotten. Over the past two years, I have thought of revitalizing it yet again on a frequent, sometimes daily basis. There have been some major events that I would have loved to have written about, and hated that I let one self-imposed roadblock keep me from picking it up again. I have continued work behind the scenes: creating a website for my wife about our wedding, switching web hosts when the first failed in spectacular fashion, switching name servers when it was the trend to boycott GoDaddy, installing WordPress updates, playing with Google's AdSense. I even went so far as to set up Facebook Connect for ease of commenting, just in case my delusions of grandeur ever produced content instead of just structure.
Yee-haw.
I've decided enough is enough, so I am ending the hiatus. I'm going to consider this a continuation rather than another fresh start. As I said previously, I had a considerable amount of content outlined, and plenty of interesting things happened to fill in a few more gaps. I am therefore embarking on a writing adventure both old and new, as I seek to fill in the gap.
Welcome to rawksome.net v3, Act 2: A Blog in Retrospect. It's my bomb, and I'm going to ride it all the way down.