Starting a Blog

Starting a blog is a lot more difficult than it seems.  A quick Google search identifies hundreds of blogs with the sole purpose of informing one how to write a blog.  The first decision one faces of course (after having succeeded the arduous indecision one faces before even touching a keyboard), is which website to use to host one's blog.  For a novice blogger (like me), the two most popular blogging platforms, namely Blogger and Wordpress, are a good place to start.  Anecdotal evidence suggests Blogger is easier to use, and combined with my attachment to integration with my Google account, as well as the somewhat vain hope that one day this might generate supplementary income via AdSense, I've chosen to use Blogger.

First hurdle hurdled.

Next, and this one took a while, one has to name one's blog.  The problem here is that the name needs to be suitably witty to keep readers engaged, but not so esoteric that they struggle to remember it when (re)tweeting/posting/talking about it to others.  Precision presumably helps for SEO and AdSense, but feels rather limiting and discourages rambling (a positive in my mind).  I'm sure a few of you familiar with my taste in literature can guess where I snatched my name from eventually, can't you?  Unfortunately, I have already had to encounter the frustration of domain squatting, hence the hyphen in my domain name.  There should really be a system where unused blogs have their domain names freed for public use after a certain period of time.

With the name decided, the rest is really rather straightforward. One picks a template, customises it to taste, and begins to write.

So far I've avoided, with sesquipedalian loquaciousness (I'll be proud if you get that reference), mentioning why I'm writing this blog or what it will be about, so here it is:

Firstly, having graduated from university last year, I've had little (read no) opportunity to write.  Secondly, I like to think that I have quite a broad spectrum of interests, ranging from the conventional (travel, music, television), to the probably more uncommon (Japanese, gender roles, "meta" analysis, post-scarcity economics).  Writing about these interests gives me an opportunity to formulate how I think about these concepts as well as an excuse for some extra research, and will hopefully be of passing interest to anyone who has the time to read this blog.  Thirdly, I am moving to Japan for at least a year to teach English via the JET Programme, and this will be another addition to the plethora of blogs chronicling the journeys of hapless westerners in Japan (but these will be MY journeys).

So how was that for a beginning?