Me, blogging, OpenDiary, and WordPress

When I first heard the term “blog” (possibly in the late nineties), it had distinctly negative connotations. In many ways, it was like Twitter today: Some people wanting to keep others abreast of their doings, others satisfying their vanity, others yet spreading junk content, and similar.

Naturally, I stayed away from the area—and, as it turned out, carried a prejudice long after the “blogosphere” had evolved from fish to reptile.

Came 2009, I started my own website. Not long thereafter, I decided to try out my own blog in order to increase traffic (in particular, to overcome the initial dry-spell before I was picked up by the search engines). Only having made minor experiences with the blogs of others, I landed at OpenDiary—without realizing how unsuitable it would be for my purposes (while perfectly valid for a diary), e.g. by having the wrong audience, providing only minimal functionality, deliberately blocking search engines, …

(I have a surprisingly hard-to-defeat tendency to assume too much about the minimum functionality provided in different areas—where even the market leaders often lack functionality that I would consider near-mandatory. For this reason, I failed to do the research I should have done.)

This was originally not a big deal: My main task was to build a website, blogging was just an incidental side-activity, and most of my entries were shortened versions of things I had written for my website. As time has gone by, however, several things have changed, notably that I have become much more aware of the advantages blogging can bring, of the many quality blogs that exist today, and that there are blog services with functionality that is actually useful. A particular benefit: I have many ideas and short texts with too little mass to make a good article for my website, but which fit reasonably in a blog.

Further, to my surprise, I am beginning to see some value in the occasional more personal entry (more akin to those found in other OD diaries). While I understand perfectly how others can benefit from “sharing”, I like to keep my private life private. Still, there are occasional events that I would like to write about, but that do not really fit with my other writings (e.g. my recent OD entries on Internet radio).

As a result, I have decided to move the conventional blogging part from OD to WordPress and use my existing OD account for more personal entries (likely with a reduced posting rate). Occasionally, entries may be posted on both, like this one.

My website: http://www.aSwedeInGermany.de

My OD diary: http://www.opendiary.com/entrylist.asp?authorcode=D794738^e

My WordPress blog: https://michaeleriksson.wordpress.com/^e

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