Today finds me pondering (once again) the way that my blogging “life” is currently divided and partitioned off.
Once upon a time, the split was pretty clear: gaming-related stuff went here, and anything that I wanted to write about that wasn’t that went onto Average-Bear. This was done for a number of reasons, but none of them were really for compartmentalization as much as organization. The problem is basically that the organization of my gaming posts would suffer dramatically if they all had to be lumped under a single heading of “Gaming” on a blog that was supposed to handle everything — the bloat from that one category would be hard to manage and the heading itself would be largely meaningless in terms of actually organizing anything — I’ve over a dozen post categories on this gaming blog, and porting all that into another blog would, at best, make that combined blog a kind of “gaming, with a few tangents” blog that I’m not interested in doing.
But the problem is that, with my new ‘main’ blog, there are things that I *don’t* want to blog about there, which aren’t gaming-related either, and thus have nowhere to go.
Which brings me back to just having one big journal for everything, and the problems be damned…
Which brings me back to actually contemplating the problems and deciding that I can’t just ignore them.
And nothing changes.
Not entirely sure what to do with that. Not sure there’s much I actually can do about it.
But I think it’s telling that I’m writing about all this on my gaming blog… a blog that actually nets quite a bit more traffic now than my ‘neutered’ main blog. What it tells me is that I’m doing something wrong.
I’m just not sure what.
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My guess is that it all goes back to purposes and audiences.
So, for example, I split out my CoX stuff into a separate blog because I figured it wouldn’t actually be of interest to most of my readers — but, on the off chance it was, I make occasional cross-references, and for the non-RSS-readers, I include a note in the sidebar of my main blog.
My understanding is that you “neutered” your main blog in order to focus on a particular audience, to which you choose to turn a particular face. Of necessity, that’s a significant limitation. On the other hand, your gaming blog is not about limiting information about yourself, but about providing full information to a more limited audience — you can be free within certain informational bounds, vs. being constrained about everything.
I don’t have any particular answers for you, aside from suggesting you consider what your goals are for blogging (in each venue). Is it journaling? Is it sharing your life with others? Is it portraying a certain image? What’s the mission/vision?
You “can has” validation.
Would it be worthwhile to import the general blog into this one as a category, then just hand out the link to your restricted blog as blah/blah/restricted-category? That might be a way to reunify while keeping some readers siloed.