Lazy Luddite Log

24.11.15

Lazy Decade

Ha! This blog has existed for ten years this month! I just noticed in looking back over it and this gives me the perfect topic for my monthly blog post. The fact I do it monthly is one of many things to have changed since I started Lazy Luddite Log back in November 2005.

I originally posted more than one entry a week. Admittedly it was new and some of the posts were housekeeping items. Some of them provided a sort of guided tour of the sidebar (now much simplified in content). Some justified the existence of my blog while also expressing my wariness of the new medium. One is a short-but-sweet musing on the nature of written records as a way of us putting our tiny stamp on history. Since then my posts have gotten longer but also less frequent and I wonder why.

My level of time-commitment to work and non-work past-times has waxed and waned but never by themselves are they an explanation for my blogging word-count. Two things seem to have happened. One is that I started writing longer posts on substantive topics that interested me and decided that this was what my blog was for. The other is that I lost the impetus to do that as much as I once did and so reduced the overall number of posts. Now they are monthly but usually rather wordy.

One thing that has definitely affected these trends is other websites. Facebook has had a major impact. Small pithy observations now automatically go to it. Announcements of events I wish to promote go there too. All that is left for Lazy Luddite Log are online essays. But I am likely writing more of those small things on FB now than in the days of only having a blog and surely we all have a total word-count per month in us. Maybe that is why I'm written fewer posts overall.

There may be other factors too. I am more of a private person than I once was and have a much smaller role in public life than I did. I also have a somewhat bigger private life. And maybe I'm just slowing down a bit. I enjoy a night at home more than I once did but also just enjoy passive distractions like looking at old movies. Once more the Internet facilitates this sort of thing like never before.

Some of those oldest posts have been edited since. That was in keeping with my original concept that this blog was subject-focused rather than chronological in nature. The fact however is that as your blog archive grows that becomes a prohibitive task. Another method I am more likely to use is the adding of comments to reflect a change while preserving the original post content.

I wonder if I will even be blogging in another decade. We shall see. For now I may spend some time looking over a decade of sometimes forgotten posts. And there may even be a few more excuses to turn an old topic into a new one in coming months.

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