One Year of Blogging

In another week or two it will have been a year since I restarted my blog. Which makes now as good a time as any to talk about how it's gone and what I think of the project.

In that time, I've written more than three times as many posts as all of my previous attempts at blogging combined (151 over the past year versus 41 prior to that). The original plan was to write one post a day... anyone that can do basic math can probably tell that didn't last very long, of course. Still, I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out so far. I set myself a goal like that because I was curious to see how much I liked writing some form of news commentary or review post every day, and "I don't, and would prefer to do it less often than daily" is a perfectly valid result for that experiment.

One of the things I would like to do instead is come up with more series-based posts that I can write in advance, rather than having to find something I consider interesting enough to write about and then actually doing so every day. That's not very easy to do with news commentary unless I'm willing to write about older stories, but I have some ideas for chapter-by-chapter book reviews and some gaming posts that might fit. So I'll be announcing some of those in the next few weeks.

Probably the biggest stress of the whole project is balancing my desire to talk about politics with the fact that I am still in the military and have no desire to damage either the military's reputation or mine with too much partisan rancor. I don't think there's much I can actually do about it until I either stop blogging or stop being in the military, but I do try to keep myself focused on facts and policy rather than the personal attacks that are all too common in political discussions. Worrying about whether I'm actually keeping myself on the right side of the line is still stressful, though.

As always, feedback is appreciated. I don't think there are more than a tiny handful of people that are actually reading this blog, but for those of you that are, thanks.