Bifurcation
This blog has a certain duality. I have had several popular posts on Digg and del.icio.us/popular, and I have many incoming links to my instructional articles on LaTeX, Word and Excel. However, I fear that someone coming to this blog through one of those links may be put off by the fact that the material that they are reading is mixed in with my miscellaneous thoughts. I also think that it’s a good practice to delineate between “personal” blogs and “topical” blogs. So far, General Disarray has been a mixture of the two.
The solution? A bifurcation. Instructional information about technology can be found at How To’s, a newly created WordPress.com blog; personal thoughts and opinions regarding this and that can be found at I Think These Things.
My intuition is that most of the subscribers to this blog came to it via Digg or a search engine, and probably aren’t interested in Chuck Norris quotes or anecdotes about my notorious insomnia. Such readers will want to subscribe to the How To’s feed.
I’m not going to update General Disarray anymore. I will, however, update How To’s as frequently as I have something interesting to say. Posting will be less frequent, since I’m going to exercise restraint and stick to one broad topic.
A note about Blogging platforms
I am a huge fan of WordPress.com, and I eagerly watch the feed for new developments. However, I have chosen to use Blogger — despite its deficiencies — to host my personal-thoughts weblog. The calculus for this decision is this: WordPress.com (and WordPress in general) is much better at organizing information than Blogger — categories and pages make your blog much more navigable. However, some of the security limitations of WordPress.com (this does not apply to custom WordPress installs) are annoying. For example, I cannot embed Odeo podcasts in WordPress.com posts, and I can’t customize my themes. In the final analysis, I think these limitations are outweighed by WordPress.com’s superior functionality and community (which is why I use it, rather than Blogger, for the material that I want to share with the most people). But the purpose of running a personal blog (for me at least) is to have fun, and as a former web developer, I enjoy messing with my templates.
