What you see here may not stay

I thought it would be different this time. I really did. I wasn’t going to let myself go more than a few days without posting, certainly not weeks . . . this was to be the grown-up blog, the one that admits to itself that it’s a blog, favoring flow over content, never slowing down for the flies to gather over one particular post. Yet here it is, and that’s what’s happened.

Part of the reason for this is a general uneasiness on my part concerning the thematic scope of the postings and the format warranted by their level of content. Are they to be treated as pieces of real writing, with paragraph breaks and room to breathe in the margins? Are the things I post better suited to something like Tumblr (from whence I came), where brevity is the norm and community trumps autonomy? I made some effort to combine those two extremes on this site, combining the main column and the “Below the Fold” section. But the hierarchy inherent in this design seems forced. The layout is basically a first-shot adaptation of a sketch I made over a quarter-liter of red wine on a rainy day in the outskirts of Paris sometime last March, and I don’t pretend that it’s in any real thoughtful way informed by the content it must now contain. The recent expansion of my design education and attention has shifted my way of thinking, so that now I feel the need to envision my content, and create a thoughtful design to hold and present it. I’m leaning toward simple and fast-loading, less gimmicky, more readerly.

Also, I’ve wrestled with how intimate one should be when writing on a blog. My thoughts on this now are certainly different from this winter, when I was holed up and posting scads of information to Facebook and sending out oddly two-dimensional versions of myself to any computer that happened to stumble upon them. I’ve reined that in: Twitter (who knew) now satisfies most of my exhibitionist desires, I’ve stripped all extraneous jabber from Facebook and locked down my pictures, and I recently resumed writing entries in a private journal that I kept for ten days in the summer of 2007. I have turned inward, in a way that is only possible after solidifying one’s connections with the outside world.

But never fear. The bully pulpit stands strong, and my PHP/CSS skills grow stronger every day. Stay tuned for exciting developments in this space . . . or don’t. I’ll surely come knocking, or at the very least Tweeting, at your virtual door when I have something new to sell and advertise.