Congratulations to Cromley on his three year blogging anniversary. In his celebratory piece he harks back to his first post, where he set out some goals for blogging:
2. If they are not interesting to anyone besides myself, they will simply be bizarre enough to elicit a rounding chorus of “WTF?”
3. This is not a journal or diary of my private thoughts. If I wouldn't converse about the topic with actual people, it doesn't belong here.
4. Everything will be true and accurate (That one might be a tad ridiculous)."
I expected at least a giggle from the preposterous ambitions of a first time blogger (I wanna make a million dollars... convert the entire Western hemisphere to my religion... lose weight...) but instead I nodded in agreement so vigorously that my glasses fell off and I had to wrest them away from the dog.
What amazed me was that Cromley's four stated goals are exactly the same guidelines I apply to my blog, on which I've been working (along with its predecessor) for nearly two years. I frequently include research related to my subject in the hope of making my writing interesting to someone besides my father and my daughter. When I wrote about making the switch from incandescent to fluorescent lighting, I researched and spoke about the differences between the two types of bulbs, hoping this would make my post more universally appealing. Furthermore, you won't find an expose of my many and varied childhood traumas here; those conversations are personal and they don't belong here.
But while Cromley was able to formulate his philosophy from the outset, it took me more than a year to be able to identify the patterns in my blogging philosophy. I'm just one of those people who finally gets the joke at 2:30 am, after the party is long over and everyone's gone home.
In any case, I get the joke now, and it's better late than... whatever.
