Punctuating The Silence

Last night, a friend of mine sent me an email wondering why I didn’t have a comments feature on my blog and that he would have commented on a few things had there been one. After the initial burst of panic that something on the site wasn’t working, I realized that while there, the comment link on the theme I’m using could easily be missed. I’ve made a slight change to the page template to duplicate the comments link at the end of each story. It’s not perfect – WordPress has a function call to generate the comments link, which means it isn’t all that flexible – but hopefully it will make things a little clearer for those who were looking for it.

Of course, this makes me wonder about how many other comments I’ve lost out on. This blog isn’t widely read, but I do get a handful of interesting people leaving me things about the things I post, which makes this a lot more interesting, so I want to be sure it’s easy for them and others to do.

Comments?

Even with the name change to reflect the nature of the blog (sporadic posting), there’s definitely something wrong with the way I do things here.  Read any article on blogging, and they’ll tell you about posting often to build an audience and a brand, and I’m just plain ignoring that.  This isn’t really a blog about any one thing (which is a problem any of the previously-mentioned articles will tell you), and that’s coupled with two problems:

The first is that I am, by nature, a fairly private person.  I know that probably seems weird to say, given my online presence, but if you examine everything about me that’s out there, it doesn’t really go that deep.  Regardless, there is a definite amount of resistance I need to overcome just to write something here (or anywhere public, for that matter).

The second problem, more directly related to blogging, is overcoming the mostly-subconscious, self-imposed expectation of having to posting something really great (which I imagine people whose blogs have an audience have), which grows worse the longer the silence gets.  There have been things I could have written about and didn’t because I didn’t think I had the time to do it justice, or just forgot about it.  Then there’s looking at the date of the last entry and thinking “wow, it’s really been a while – I need something to write about”, and then rejecting most of the ideas as “not good enough”.

I have the head-knowledge bit of overcoming this (just write something!), but is there a practical thing I can do to overcome this other than just “getting over it”?

With the recent release of WordPress version 2.5, I decided it was time to upgrade, and along with that, I decided to change the name of the blog.  I’ve been considering this for some time, and finally found the excuse to do it with the upgrade.  The old name was a bit of a play on the opening of every Max Headroom episode (the text would come on the screen just after the opening credits: “20 minutes into the future…”).  Geeky and slightly obscure, sure, but the new title speaks a little better to the frequency with which I tend (not) to update this blog.