Over the past year or so, I’ve being doing a particular type of blog post that tends to be longer, exclusively faith-based, and coordinated either with the liturgical year or the news.
It’s been a very successful effort!
Unfortunately, it’s been mostly done at my Register blog, with comparatively little totally fresh content here at JimmyAkin.com.
The fact is that I don’t have time to compose those longer, detailed posts both for the Register and for other outlets.
That means that JimmyAkin.com has largely been linking to content that I’ve been posting in its entirety elsewhere.
I’ve felt bad about that.
There are people who visit and subscribe to JimmyAkin.com despite that situation. In fact, there are over 1,000 people who have signed up to get email updates from the blog, but I’d like to serve them and others even better by having more exclusive content here that people can read without having to click through to another site.
But there’s still that lack of time problem.
So here’s what I’ve found myself thinking: I periodically have thoughts, make discoveries, etc., that are small enough I can write them down quickly, that wouldn’t take up one of the long-form blog posts.
Often, they are ideas or notes that I mean to incorporate into some later work (a blog post, a book, etc.) and I don’t want to lose track of them.
- I’ve thought about writing them in a big Word document, but that would be messy, particularly with all these thoughts on different subjects in one file.
- I thought about keeping a bunch of different files, but that’s awkward.
- I thought about putting them on Facebook, but Facebook’s search features are terrible and it would be hard to find them later.
Finally, I thought, “I should just create a blog for these.” That way I’d have a searchable record of them, with the individual thoughts/discoveries as discreet items.
Then I thought: “You already have a blog, stupid. . . . And it needs more attention!”
So here’s what I’m going to do: Even though I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, I’m going to experiment with doing short posts that capture interesting things I don’t want to lose track of.
I hope you’ll find them interesting, too!
Many (most?) of them will be religious. Some may not be.
The links to my other work in the blogosphere will also continue, so these new posts will be in addition to, not a replacement of, the kind of postings I’ve been doing this year.
Here we go!
P.S. Happy New Year, everyone!
This sounds pretty great to me.
And I like it when you write about things other than religion occasionally. I like your Doctor Who posts, even if I don’t actually watch the show.
Of course, what I always try to tell people in your position is, it’s ultimately up to you how much of your time and energy you want to put into making stuff to give away for free on the Internet. I’m grateful for whatever you feel like posting. (I have to remind myself of that sometimes, but it’s the truth.)