Blog future
I've been thinking for the past couple weeks, intermittently, about what to do with this blog.
It was originally going to be a place for me to post early cites of newly coined words, but that hasn't worked out so well; among other things, as I noted recently, most newly coined words that I see are obvious portmanteaus that don't strike me as especially interesting. (I should note that it was also originally going to be an experiment; I would try stuff out and see what worked and what didn't. I didn't have a fully formed plan from the start.)
So it's become mostly a place for me to post about words that I don't recall having encountered before, regardless of how old they are, and about interesting new-to-me etymologies of words I already know, and about a few other particular topics. But as is obvious to regular readers, I've been sporadic at best about posting. I have probably two or three dozen words lined up in my notes files to post about, but each one takes a little time to write up, and I delay and then before I know it it's been three or four weeks since my last post. Then I do a burst of posts all at once (set on a scheduled automatic release of about a day and a half between posts), and then the blog falls into neglect again.
Meanwhile, I've been occasionally going through some old mail related to my old Words & Stuff column, and noticing again that I never replied to or posted a lot of old reader comments.
And that the columns themselves have little or no context. Someone arrives at a column via a web search, and assumes that it's the only thing I ever wrote, and drops me a cryptic note about it. There's no easy navigation from one column to another, and no framing to make clear that each column is part of a greater whole.
So a couple of weeks back, it occurred to me that I could port all the old columns into this blog (and probably rename the blog), which would provide all sorts of useful advantages at once. And furthermore, I could repurpose this blog to become a sort of Words & Stuff 2.0; whenever I had a language-related note to post, even if not at all related to new words, I could post it here instead of in my regular journal.
I have also, on occasion, thought about having guest bloggers here. I think it's an interesting and probably good idea, but the control freak in me cringes at the idea of letting someone else into my blog.
I'm still not sure about any of this. Porting the old columns would take some time and work, so it's not likely to happen anytime in the next few weeks. And is it better to separate out language-related stuff, or to post it as part of my regular journal, one topic among many? And would the language blog lose a lot of its particular flavor if the entries here were regularly longer? One of my goals has been to generally keep entries here short and to the point, making this blog perhaps a little more friendly to those with limited reading time than my regular journal is.
Anyway. Haven't made any decisions yet, but thought it was worth posting to let y'all know what I'm thinking about.