It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
- Bilbo Baggins
I don't have real plans for this blog. I don't have real plans for my life yet. All I know is I want to try my hand at producing my own content on the internet and that I think I like writing. Here we go.
As Bilbo told Frodo in The Lord of the Ring (quote above), the decision to leave your comfort zone has unknowable consequences. There's no way to know who you might come across or whether that interaction will positively or negatively impact you. You may be swept off your feet by the person of your dream or yelled at by an angry bus driver and attacked for a labradoodle. Uncertainty is neither good nor bad, but those who try to keep everything perfectly centain will never embark on a great adventure.
I've gone most of my life as a perfectionist, and I mean that in the negative sense. Even when starting this blog, I struggled to commit to a specific solution. There were too many things to think about: what domain provider should I use? Should I have a special email for the blog? What email provider should I use? Should I host my own content or use a hosted solution? Should I only write about one subject matter or whatever comes to mind? At every turn, I couldn't help but try to research the best solution. I committed to starting a blog a long time ago, but was stuck on the "what if" questions until today.
The only thing I want to get out of this blog is the ability to do things more efficiently. I don't have time to work my day job and work on this site full time, but I want to be able to post my thoughts on here regularly. I'd love to improve my writing skills, or sharpen my wit, or become an expert in some topic so I can write about it with authority. But these are dreams that are tangential to this website. I don't want this blog to be "perfect", and I want to learn to be ok with that.
There are some things that I want to commit to:
- Every photograph I post will be my own, or from a family member. If I don't use my own, I will make it abundantly clear where I got it from.
- I will (generally) write longer-form pieces. Shorter, more frequent blog posts drive SEO, but that's not that kind of writing I want to do. I'm targeting the 5-15 minute reading time instead of the 1-3 minute posts I see on most blogs.
- For the next year or so, I'll commit to one post per week. The posts may have to be scheduled, but they'll be there.
- Full transparency about the technologies I'm using so you can make more informed decisions about your privacy on this site. For now, I'll add it to the About page.
I took the photo of the troll in the feature image a few years ago at the Weta Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. I think the trolls in The Lord of the Rings are an excellent example of a danger that one might face on the road. Bilbo and the dwarves were horribly unprepared for that danger. But they did receive some very nice swords for their efforts, and their encounter became one of legend.