Note: This post was written shortly after I started a Marley version of this blog. It may have been the only post I wrote specifically for that site – development on Marley basically stopped, and I had some problems with hosting the Sinatra-based site which randomly prevented it from loading. Consequently I migrated to a jekyll version of the site, then to this Octopress version. These moves were made with the same general aims: writing in a text editor, authoring in markdown, versioning in git, using a static site for speed, and avoiding the security/update hell of platforms such as WordPress. Where I refer to renaming the site in this post, it was the renaming of the Marley version as “Steve Murphy: Infrequent Blogger”. Still pretty accurate.
Clearly I’ve been really bad at keeping my blog up-to-date. Even for me that is. The few posts that are published here definitely have large time gaps between them (hence my renaming of the site). In fact, I’m sure I could lay claim to being the world’s worst blogger, based on the fact that I have not just this site, but a number of others that are equally neglected.
The real issue is not publishing, but that my blog output does not match the frequency with which I think of things to blog about. I enjoy writing, I really do want to blog often and I have lots to write about; it’s just that the posts don’t happen.
And it’s not simply about the act of writing. One thing I have learned is that I like to write for an audience (note that I don’t actually expect an audience here – but the act of making my writing public will suffice; see also). So getting things up on to a blog should be an extra incentive on top of my desire to write.
But I don’t do it. Why is this?
Recently I have been thinking that Twitter might be the culprit: I have been twittering for the last couple of years and maybe that has taken up time and allowed me to express myself enough to satisfy my publishing urges. I wouldn’t be alone in that: I’ve seen some others comment on how they blog less now that they twitter. However, what I twitter is almost never the kind of thing I would blog about. My current (expanding) list of topics to blog about has really grown out of the fact that they are not 140 character ideas. And I rarely posted anything in the past that was a tweet-length idea anyway. So, twittering has not replaced my blogging, it is something else again, which is probably the way it should be.
There is another suspect: the ease of blogging. One of the reasons I’ve set up so many different blogs is to experiment with various platforms in the hope of finding the one that makes it really easy. I know other people manage to write lots using WordPress or any of the large variety of perfectly good systems out there. But I like writing with my tools – and writing in a text box on the web, or in an editor/client such as ecto, MarsEdit or blogo (which is actually pretty good) just doesn’t feel right to me. Most of the time I write in a text editor of some kind, using Markdown for styling and structuring my text, before converting to whatever format I need for publishing when it feels finished. That means I can use any platform to write with simple tools that don’t get in the way. For example, this post started in WriteRoom on my iPhone because I had it with me and then ended up in Tinderbox because I happened to have that open when I next felt like working on it. I did the final edit in TextMate from where I committed it to a git repository – providing versioning, backup and an instant publishing mechanism thanks to the Marley blog platform I’m using on this site. Of course, I fully understand why this wouldn’t work for many people and why WordPress would. But how others work is not my problem. Not only does this work for me, it suits me.
In the end, it probably comes down to the fact that Twitter has been okay for me lately because it requires little inertia. Something simple to say, very little time, not much effort. On the other hand, blogging is just a bit harder – but I see how that can be a good thing. I would like to think that the extra time and effort required to blog something allows for a little extra thought and editing, resulting in better quality writing. I’d leave you to be the judge of that but there probably is no “you” out there, so I’ll just be my own critic for now.