It has been almost 2 years since I posted on this blog. It was always a pretty sporadic thing. Part of the trouble was trying to balance all the things I wanted to write about, but filtering for things that would be interesting publicly and writing in a way fit for the public. That was back when lots of my friends were using using LiveJournal and microblogging hadn't taken over. The last 2 years, this has been replaced by two things: Twitter and OhLife. I, like most of my friends, have moved public updating to Twitter/Facebook/Google+. It's a lot easier and in-the-moment than writing out a whole blog post.

The bigger change was that I found a better way to do the public/private balance. I discovered OhLife, a private online journal. It is novel in that it emails me every day to remind me to write in it, and I can write my entry by just replying to the email. Plus it give me a little reminder of something I wrote in the past each day. Unlike my previous attempts at blogging which rapidly fell into long periods of disuse, I've managed to write in my OhLife journal an entry for every day for the last year. It's not just that it is convenient and gives me good reminders (in a way I can't ignore forever, emails in my inbox), it's the fact that it's private. That means that I can write whatever I want without worrying who will see it. I don't have to censor personal or confidential info, I don't have to worry about what is interesting to anyone but me, and I don't have to worry about good style. Not all the entries have to be gems. Some are long with interesting rants and some are really short with just a list of what I did that day.

Well, I realize that the time has come to shift the balance back towards public. There are just some ideas that are too interesting to keep private and too long for 140 characters. My new goal is for some of my OhLife rants and idea to make it here when I think they are worth sharing. I'll be starting that with a few I have queued up shortly.