Plans For This Blog

This isn’t vastly consequential, but I’ll say it anyway.

I went through a fairly long period of posting once a day on here. This was disrupted by my decision to do “Switch Off Saturday” every Saturday, which to me has a religious theme, namely Sabbath observance. I’ve also been into the question of cultural appropriation on this point, an issue which I should probably cover in more depth in general. After that time, there tended to be gaps in my schedule. I have no idea whether this matters to anyone, including myself. I’ve also found myself starting a new post as soon as I’ve finished the first.

This has had various consequences. It means I don’t give myself enough time to respond to comments, and also it can interfere with the lucidity of my writing, which is at the best of times rather poor and verbose. When I need to research something, it can also impact on that, although most of the time I’m writing off the top of my head and doing a bit of fact-checking. I would like to be pithier and better-researched, and if I’m writing hell for leather as I often do, this goes out of the window. There’s a guy who’s been waiting on an answer to a comment he made for about a week now, and I don’t like to leave people hanging like that. I would also like to exploit the HTML and perhaps Javascript involved in WordPress, and possibly come up with my own theme. Currently I either write everything in a text editor and copypaste it into the block editor or use the block editor directly, which has in the past caused me to lose content.

It would be possible to come up with some kind of publication schedule divorced to some extent from the rate of production, although in order to do that it would be necessary to pause posting for a while in order to build up a series of posts while working on others. I do sometimes have draft posts hanging around in some form which see the light of day after some time, and in fact I currently have a language-related post in that condition which I held back because of the seriousness of the Afghan situation requiring some kind of comment. However, I don’t plan to do that because I think I sometimes inundate this place, people’s readers and social media with relentless posting. This arises to some extent from what seems to be hypergraphia. I often feel compelled to write in some form, and some of it appears on here. Another difficulty is that I am often writing for other purposes, for instance for clients, and having to post every day interferes with that work.

What, then, am I planning to do with this blog?

Well, I plan to break free from the schedule of daily posts for a start. This feels like quite a rigid structure against which I want to rebel. I suppose that’s part of my personality. However, this doesn’t mean I’m going to post less often. It may even mean I post more frequently. For instance, when I finish this post, which will probably be untagged by the way because it’s only relevant to regular readers, I will submit it immediately, without scheduling. This may eclipse my previous post, but it’s worth experimenting with. I think it’s entirely acceptable to leave gaps of days between posts because I get the impression that my writing might be perceived as an interminable avalanche of verbosity, and I’d like to be less annoying to you all.

You can therefore expect, I hope, more pithy, less verbose prose worked out in a little more detail, probably still submitted on average once a day but sometimes more and sometimes less often. Also, it might get more interesting to interact with and look a bit prettier.

Bye for now.