Thinking through the blog

This is a second post I have written for a blog that, as yet, has no particular direction. What I think I will do is to spend this post meditating a bit on some objectives and goals for the blog, though I am loathe to spell it our too clearly. I don’t want to get uptight about blogging in general, so I would rather craft a few ideas that might help me to keep this blog on track without spelling it out in too much detail.

• This is not a freewriting blog. One of my other blogs is entirely made up of freewritten posts, so this blog really should be written in a more substantive style. That being said, I really don’t want to spend a ton of energy writing this blog. I’ll need to give this point some more thought.
• I need to leave the example pages in place. One thing that attracted me to this Jekyll theme was that the example pages are very useful for sparking layout ideas. I’ll leave them in place for now, or I can possibly move them to a different folder. Ultimately, this blog should be populated with my posts, but let me leave the designer’s examples where they are until I can think of some other appropriate solution.
• Perhaps this can be a writing outlet for my news reading. Or it can be an outlet for reading in general. Academic reading always causes me to write, so it may be good to have this blog as an outlet for that kind of writing. The freewriting blog has helped me with my writing fluency, but a blog that comments on my reading would be very useful. It would also encourage me to read more.
• I may need to promote this blog. I have been resistant to promoting my work on social media in the past, but if this blog is going to be written more substantially I should get in the habit of posting them to Facebook and Twitter. I should also make sure people can subscribe to the blog, either by email, or Atom, or both.

Thinking beyond the blog

What I really need to be writing is my book manuscript, so if I could use this blog to help me with the book project that would be most helpful. Ultimately, any sort of blog I write should be a part of my professional portfolio, so I do need to keep at least one blog focused on my academic pursuits. My number one professional goal is to land a substantial teaching gig, and a decent blog - as well as a published book - would help me to achieve that goal. Let me ponder the deeper purposes of writing in my life and see if I can get this blog to align with it even just a little bit. Writing is the cornerstone of good teaching, after all.