xset

Or then again maybe not

// July 14th, 2004 // Personal

Uh … well this is more than a little embarrassing. I nearly managed to go 10 days before I changed my mind about whether to blog or not. Thanks go to Helen for providing the catalyst for this reconsideration.

Before I continue I’d like to state a couple of the reasons behind my decision to stop. The first is quite simple. I was developing a total inability to post. I would load the page and stare at a blank white text box for what seemed like an eternity and then quietly close the browser window and get on with something else. Why? Well it’s not like I’m short on ideas for content. I must have about 30 or 40 a day but for some reason, as soon as I sit down to type them up my mind goes blank.

My second reason was one that I attempted to explain to Markiss last night (right before I picked up his bar tab). The blog was trying to do too much. When I started I had absolutely no idea which direction it was going to take and as such it seemed to go nowhere. I rarely post anything of consequence and for some reason that really started to get to me. XSet was is a purely personal site but I wanted it to be much more. I have since managed to solve this issue by my acquisition of quizzical.org.uk which will be developed over the course of the year into something which I hope will be very worthwhile. I’m not saying more than that at the moment … you’ll just have to wait.

Third – privacy, or to be more precise a total lack of it. There are people at work who read the site, limiting my ability to be honest. There are people in my family who have no doubt found the site. There are friends far and wide who tune in, many of them silently (i.e. Not commenting) and all in I was finding my options more and more restricted. Those restrictions are still present but I have decided not to let them bother me. I will still maintain the same level of discretion when posting so as to avoid any professional faux pas but I no longer feel that this in anyway reduces the worth of a personal blog. As Helen so concisely put blogging requires defining boundaries and having limits and it would say very little for my skills as a copy writer if I were unable to perform within those boundaries.

The fourth reason is very personal and I won’t share it here but suffice to say it affected all areas of my life – blog included.

You know when I started writing this I only had 2 reasons but now I come to think of it there seem to be hundreds. Fifth was a technical problem which meant that some people were having real problems accessing the site and / or emailing me. The thing that I really enjoy about blogging is not the facility to talk to the world (although that is quite cool – as Matthew Lilliard says at the end of hackers “Kinda makes you feel like God”) but rather the fact that I get feedback and input from people I’ve never met. Being a web-head and something of a perfectionist it really bugged me that some people couldn’t access the site when they wanted to – bugged me to the point of pulling the plug.

My final reason is one that I will find hardest to dispel and one that is also hardest to define. Blogging has opened up a world of opinion, a vast expanse of differences and cultures. Unfortunately these opinions are not always in accordance with my own, some are valid, some are not, all are permissible but I sometimes find myself despairing when bloggers who I respect suddenly drop a bombshell. I am probably overly tolerant of many things but have found that beneath the calm and informative surface of the ‘sphere are some very dark undercurrents. This I will have to deal with on my own. I can’t really bring myself to speak out as many of the views that I disagree with are quite widely held and easily (perhaps a little too easily) justified. I’m just going to have to learn to deal with them.

So, where are we at? Well posting will occur as and when. I’d expect it to be light for a while until I deal with reason 5 which should be sorted in the next couple of weeks. Until then, watch this space.

Rob

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I’d like to say thanks to all the people who left kind words and comments. I’d also like to apologise to anyone who may be annoyed by this change of heart (but in that instance I’m in good company!) and to those who think this is nothing more than an attempt to feed me ego, drum up support, links or whatever else … biteme!