My Blog After One Month

We are very fortunate to be living in a time when we can set up our our web logs and express ourselves openly to others who may live anywhere in the world. It's been one month since I began this, my first blog. At first, I used a pseudonym to allow myself to put out stuff relatively anonymously. In less than a week, though, I switched to my real name and, a little later, put in my location and picture. My rule of thumb with my blog content is the same that I've heard people stress about e-mail messages: don't send out anything you're not prepared for the whole world to read! And I haven't, although at this point I doubt that very many people have been reading it. This is fine with me, because my purpose with this blog has always been to instill within myself the discipline of daily writing coupled with the knowledge of others possibly reading it.

Along with this blog project, I've been sampling blogs that others are doing. The contents of different blogs vary greatly. Some are purely commercial; others are academic. There are religious blogs and political blogs. Still others, like mine, are personal in scope. Among these, there is also great diversity. I've seen blogs dedicated to babies, running, cooking, political opinions, travel, poetry, music, and personal diaries. There are also blogs that, like mine, deal with different topics from day to day. And there are many that reflect a much more sophisticated knowledge of computers than I have. It is with these that I have to be on my guard about comparing myself. For Desiderata, a spiritual poem written by an Indiana lawyer/poet named Max Ehrmann (1872-1945), contains the thoughtful lines, "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself". Everyone who writes in their personal blog does so from their own unique perspective and experiences. And that includes me as well. As long as I keep that in mind and just be myself, then I should be able to avoid the "comparison trap". But I do see some things that others are doing with their blogs, especially concerning graphic design and pictures, that I'd like to get good at on my own.