For the two years between the time I got married and I graduated from Utah State University, my wife and I lived in a 400-square-foot apartment that we fondly refer to as “The Shoebox.”

Every so often, we’d get in the mood to rearrange the furniture. You wouldn’t think that 400 square feet gave us many options, but we managed it. The funniest part is that we’d both get in the mood to rearrange things on the same night—at about 11:00.

So I have the urge to rearrange things occasionally and to try something new. This is one of those times. In about a week, I’ll have been blogging for two years. Last year on my first anniversary of blogging, I started Gryphon Mountain Tales, “the more mythological side of the Mountain.” This year, I’ve redesigned my site visually. (If you attended my STC webinar on February 10, you got a bit of a preview in the designs of my slides.)

Wanting a change of scenery isn’t the only reason I’ve done this. A better reason is that I think the original design didn’t really fit me anymore; it didn’t fit what I’m trying to convey about myself. The new design, with its header image, tells more about me than the last one did. I’ve got a professional side, but I don’t mind acting like a cartoon character sometimes.

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One of the pieces of blogging advice you may get is to keep posts short. People don’t have long attention spans, and they flit from piece to piece of information without staying long at any particular one. Writing short posts can be nice also because you can write without making a big time commitment.

Still, I personally prefer to write longer posts much of the time. Most of the time, “longer” means just a few paragraphs, but at other times, I like to use the post to explore my thoughts. It’s hard to get into the guts of an idea or concept in 100 or 200 words. Just because I like writing, it can be tempting to keep writing. The trick is to actually go somewhere with my comments rather than to follow the train of thought until it ends in the middle of the woods, instead to end strong and with a point that connects with people.

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I remember becoming aware of blogs when I was in college; before that time, I hadn’t really spent any time online at all. In my initial judgment, I saw blogs as ongoing egotistical opinion articles—basically newspapers with only an editorial section. I didn’t have much motivation to be involved with them at any level.

Having been a blogger for nearly a year and a half has changed my opinion. Of course I have realized that blogs aren’t just people’s opinions on what’s going on in the news.

I admit that there’s a self-serving aspect to blogging. If you blog, you should write for yourself to a large degree. I usually write about whatever aspect of tech comm or writing crosses my mind, and I just have that urge to write about it. It’s a bit strange that I want to write in my spare time about what I think about at work, but there you have it. (If I want to write in this space but not about writing itself, I write a Tale.)

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I finally updated to WordPress 2.8 today. It looks a lot like the previous version, and I haven’t taken time to explore the new aspects yet.

However, I realized why it can be good to wait a little while to upgrade something like WordPress. After I installed the new version, I got an error similar to the one displayed at menoob.com in a post about the issue.

I followed the suggestion there, though I used FileZilla to change the plugin file name. (Fortunately, of all the plugins that could have failed, this one isn’t critical.) Bam! I could sign in to my admin site. My thanks to the menoob guy.

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I’ve been a slacker when it comes to posting this week because I’ve been working on a series of cartoons for Tom Johnson’s 12 Days of Christmas in June Giveaway. Here are the rules. The general idea is that Tom will be posting these captionless cartoons for 12 days straight and giving software away to the writers of the best captions. It’s a chance to have some fun, but hurry—Day 1 is already gone.

There’s a joke in that title somewhere… but I couldn’t tease it out without trying too hard. It’s 9:30pm, and I’m using that as my excuse.

I tended to get really far behind in reading the RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to and would have to go on a reading binge to catch up. Even at the moment, I haven’t been able to get to them in some days.

But I decided recently that the best way for me to keep up is to read at lunchtime. I eat at my desk but typically do something to rest my brain anyway, and I have my computer right there. After I started doing this, I hadn’t quite caught up before I got down to business this week and worked on a presentation during lunch. But tomorrow I should be able to get back to the feeds and work on catching up again. As soon as I’m caught up, it shouldn’t be any trick at all to keep that way because I’ll just be reading the few that are posted that day.

To those who read my blog and whose blogs I subscribe to, I’m sorry I haven’t been included in your feed counters lately. But I’ll be reading again soon. (I’m sure you didn’t miss me.)

Today marks the first anniversary of my first entry in the Gryphon Mountain Journals. I can’t believe that I have been blogging that long already.

One day early in 2008, esteemed colleague Tom of I’d Rather Be Writing fame told me that I should start a blog. I may have scoffed. What would I blog about? I didn’t know. But he had put the idea in my head, and I couldn’t get it out.

Soon after, Tom presented at an Intermountain STC chapter meeting. He talked about getting started and some concerns and challenges that accompany blogging. I asked how an aspiring blogger chooses a topic, and he said, “Blog about what you’re passionate about.”

Since writing is my favorite thing, that became my topic.

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