I’ve been mucking about on blogs since the mid-2000s, egads, but I’ve never been terribly reflective about it. At least since that time, I’ve had other forms of writing that seemed more serious to me: verse, initially, then academic writing, and now some mix of nonfiction and academic writing and maybe a little verse on the side, too. Blogging has, at times, seemed to be a place for my trifles: a place to make a few notes about my current idle preoccupations, whether that might be pop music, or music videos, or random little thoughts about technology and programming, or book reviews (thanks, O’Reilly, for all reviewer ebooks!), or whatever.
As I get older, and belatedly realize the necessity of being a bit more focused and disciplined about my various disparate projects, I wonder whether a blog might not be a good place to put all of the really good ideas that I don’t have time to follow up on in the moment. When my life was more single-minded, it was easy (or easier, despite my perennial scatteredness) to have a couple of places where I kept track of the projects that were the most important. I never managed to get through all of the reading, or all of the other various notes to myself, but even getting through some appreciable fraction was often enough to count for something. As my life has become more varied, a single location where I can set down some reasonably coherent thoughts about various projects seems like a good idea. The membra disiecta of my various notes will probably always be a bit of a wilderness, but I can live with that.
Because the reality is that I do reread my own blog posts, as self-indulgent as it feels to admit. I give most of my posts a read through before they go live, and so the prose is often less execrable than some of my other writings; and so a blog might be one of the few places I have that I will almost certainly return to: old notebooks and note files often get filed away and forgotten, but I do reread old blog posts.