I Just Can't Help Myself
When I renamed my Tumblr account earlier this week, I had all the intentions in the world of just using Tumblr going forwards – of keeping things simple. Then, while setting up the account, and pointing Feedburner at it, I started to have second thoughts – and ended up creating a blog over at Blogger, purely as a backup really. Then I started thinking (always dangerous) about how much I liked Blogger, and how simple it was, and how much easier it was to write something when you didn't have to think about an audience.
It's all Victoria's fault. She writes a blog at Blogger, and has done for longer than I can remember. I think we crossed paths prior to the first running of NaBloPoMo, but I could be wrong. Anyway – she has always had this knack of writing about anything and everything, and you feel like she is confiding in you. I'm wondering if divorcing myself from the whole social aspect of blogging that Wordpress and Tumblr force upon you somehow unlocks words that otherwise wouldn't have made it to the page.
Maybe I'm being stupid. I don't know. I make most things up as I go along – particular where blogging is concerned, so pay no attention.
It might interest you to know how I write blog posts, because it's probably not how you might expect. I write all the text in a plain text editor – usually Notepad++ for Windows, but I've also been known to use TextMate on the old Mac, Editorial on the iPad, and Evernote on the Fire tablet. The text file ends up filed away into a folder in DropBox – filed by year and month. I have all of my blog posts stored in that format, stretching right back to January 2003. Once the text file is saved, I copy the body text over to Tumblr, or Blogger, or wherever I'm writing the blog post.
I don't know why I write in the way I do any more. It seemed like a good idea when I first started it. Professional writing people would probably call it an editorial workflow, or something similar. Most of my reasons are paranoia – fear of being locked into a given blogging platform. Most of the reason I won't rely totally on Tumblr is because you can't easily export from Tumblr (or rather you can – into Wordpress, which is yet another walled social garden).
I'm rambling on and on – if you're still reading you probably deserve a medal.
So what am I going to do? I don't really know. I'm still thinking of Tumblr as “the blog”, but I'm also cross-posting into Blogger as a kind of fall-back. I'm not anticipating people will find the Blogger posts unless they subscribe – and that's fine really – it fits in with the whole freedom thing that I talked about earlier.
It's interesting really – although I enjoy using many aspects of the “social internet”, I still value anonymity enormously. Maybe it's to do with my make-up as a person.