When I started blogging back in the early 2000s (on what I think was the fourth full website I had designed), I had no idea I would still be doing it over a decade later. In fact I still viewed “blog” as something of a dirty word at the time, since anyone could set up a LiveJournal and discuss the tedious minutiae of their lives without any knowledge of the Web or skill in design (early on we might have been somewhat snobbish about the democratisation of the Web), so for a long while I laboriously skirted around ever using the word to describe this section of the site. Back then it was the “earth” section of the four elements, though ever since the redesign a few years later, I have always thought “fragments” a particularly apt description, mirrored nicely by my recent foray into short fiction “shards“.
At different times this blog has served as a myriad of things: diary, notepad, travelogue, postcard, notice board, magazine column, scrapbook, product review, and more. It has grown and changed over the years as I have (which may be to say not discernibly). Intermittently it has felt as though it has served its purpose and, as writing time becomes increasingly scarce, perhaps something that ought to be retired. Last time I took a long break from blogging, upon returning I decided to attempt shorter entries, which made regular posting easier and less time-consuming. The problem is that this lent itself well to quick life updates but poorly to any deeper discourse.
Now those life updates are arguably best handled through the gallery, where a dozen photographs speak some (alleged) 12,000 words. It’s hard to argue with the sheer efficiency of numbers like that! I can also see the change in traffic sources, with most visitors now arriving through social media and, as a result, most of the discussion happens on those social media posts rather than here. That makes it less necessary to have a centralised “hub” blog post, on which people can comment, to direct people any new gallery that goes up.
Instead I find myself wanting to engage more comprehensively with fewer topics, so you should expect to see more long-form posts on whatever subjects happens to be on my mind. There is likely to remain a similarly varied mixture of content and style, from interestingly informative to thoughtfully provocative to irreverently satirical. In fact those variations may now become starker since each post will get to be Its Own Thing.
So I have returned from the wilderness. I cannot say whether I will still be blogging in another decade, but the future is ever unpredictable. Whatever comes, I do hope that you will still be reading.
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