Been running across a lot of metablogging and eaasys about journalling lately. Seems to be the meme of the moment. One such essay had a lot of good advice on the questions on should ask oneself before self publishing something like this. Questions like “what is my intended audience?”, “why do I want to do this?”, “do I want my friends/family/dog to read this?” and so on. Good things to think about. This is stuff I thought about, not just before I started this incarnation of my site, but back in ‘98 when I first put up the ‘Lair. I’d actually wanted a web page since I went online in ‘95, but back then I had no idea what I wanted to do with it. So I held off.

A lot of the advice was very common sense-ish. Well DUH, of course anyone can read your journal. It’s on the WEB. If you are writitng something your mom shouldn’t read, don’t put it out there. Or accept that mother is going to find out more about you than you were willing to share with her directly.

Some of the advice was suprising. Seems a lot of people write journals and get obsessive if they don’t think anyone reads them. Or they get upset if not *enough* people read them. I have no idea how many people read this. I don’t check my log files at all. (And I’m sitting *three feet* from my server, so this is not because I can’t) This project is for me. But every now and then I get an email from someone who got a smile ’cause they stopped by. And hey, that’s enough to make me smile.