Impending retirement of this blog
The time is fast approaching to retire this blog. I haven't exactly relegated it to the scrap heap, but I still feel it's gone from the back burner to the bottom shelf to the back of a stack of boxes in the basement. It's still there for anyone's perusal. But I just feel like it isn't adding much value. Not that anything I wrote would actually add much value to anyone's experiences, but I just want to make sure the blog is pulling its weight.
Why have I felt ambivalent about keeping this blog going? Well, several reasons. First, I'm not sure what it's really for, except me ranting from time to time. And if you know me, you know that ranting on a blog would be a good reason to keep it going because it would keep me from ranting aloud, which nobody really wants to hear anymore. However, it's also a bad reason because it means I'm taking up cyberspace with long streams of consciousness that would do better to be set down in a journal or something of that nature. Sometimes doing it the old-fashioned way has its advantages, and this could be one of them. One person even told me the other day that she felt like she was reading diary entries as she pored over some of my earlier blog entries. That really told me it was time to change the style of this thing.
Second, the blog has a boring interface and I haven't had much motivation to do anything to it to make it more attractive. These days, it's so difficult to grab attention on the Internet that you have to come up with something really jumpy, with something new and interesting going on, to hold anyone's interest for too long. The words probably don't cut it as much as they used to unless you're a pop luminary or similar larger-than-life figure, which I am definitely not! So I feel like the interface has just stagnated and that, even if I put a little effort into it, it still might not turn out quite right.
Finally, and most importantly, I don't like the name of the blog. I love my own name, but naming a blog after myself seems a little pretentious to me. I could be way off-base, but I almost feel like I'm not worthy of putting my name into the URL of a blog. I made that the name because I wasn't sure of a good nickname at the time, so I sort of did it in the same fashion I would create an email address if I were momentarily starved for a nickname. I feel like it's time for a change to something a little catchier. chrisdrake.blogspot.com almost assumes people would want to know what I was writing about, but then again this thing isn't read all that often anyway, I can tell, so I might be sort of out of my league on that one. That's alright, though, because better things are yet to come.
We're about to hit spring in the Northern Hemisphere, I'm about to turn 25 (just over a month from now - scary!), and I'm about to turn over a new blogging leaf. After 18 1/2 months, it's time for something new. I think I might take some old entries and incorporate them into a new blog, but otherwise there will be something that hopefully will raise a few eyebrows on the superficial and deep levels alike!
One thing I'm sure of, though, is how nice it is to have this blog sitting here, whenever I feel the urge to pour my guts out into cyberspace for a few moments. It's definitely comforting.
Only a matter of time now before this thing shifts into overdrive and, hopefully, accelerates into the distance, down the long, straight highway in the middle of the desert, with craggy hills and scrub brush all around, and the setting sun flanked by low-hanging clouds, blazing ahead into the future...