Six Months in the Sphere

May 1, 2006 / Dead Reckoning came online with “The First Account” on November 4th, 2005. It will be six months old in a few days time. Here are a few random thoughts on the whole Sphere ’O The Blog thing.

Dead Reckoning came online with “The First Account” on November 4th, 2005. It will be six months old in a few days time. Here are a few random thoughts on the whole Sphere ’O The Blog thing.

Blogging is damn fine fun. Even though the numbers are modest I think that more people read my blog than read my research papers as a grad student. Since I like to write (something I’ve truly rediscovered since I took leave from my studies) it’s good to know that it’s products are going out there somewhere instead of sitting in a half-remembered directory on my filesystem. In fact I’m a terrible diarist so if I didn’t think a few people would read it pretty soon after I post it then I probably wouldn’t write it at all. Now, I said that the numbers were modest, and there are various ways of measuring such things, but in case you’re curious let’s just say that I’m in no danger of being read at the White House any time soon:

Results page on which this site appears in a search for “dead reckoning”

The technical aspects of keeping a blog up-and-running are engrossing, and as I wrote in a recent nerd-dispatch, my publishing software, WordPress, has kindled a whole new kind of geeklove in me. Layout is a challenge though, and one that’s not as instantly rewarding or enjoyable as I would have thought. Writing CSS for a content management system that produces pages dynamically is not nearly as straight-forward as styling static pages. But the site is almost looking the way I had imagined and it will probably never “get there”—at least not as my first serious attempt.

As to the material itself, it seems to me that Dead Reckoning is all over the place. I have a few favourite blogs and I watch how these guys and girls do it. The best ones usually (though not always) are fairly tightly constrained to a particular topic or set of issues, and then offer well-targeted analysis, critique or simple observation and information. Some of the more widely cast blogs that I’ve happened across are consistently high in quality, but you can tell that it’s much harder to do. It makes me wonder, what the hell would I blog about if I constrained myself to one topic or area? Absolutely no idea. Gives me the creeps to think about it, so I guess if you keep tracking this vessel you’re stuck with a Jack-of-All-Trades-style captain at the helm.

If you’ve been following recently here are a few things you’d already know: In January I pulled out of school. In February Elena and I were amazed by Brokeback Mountain. In March cyclones Larry and Glenda caught Australia in a pincer attack, while the Ricky Gervais Podcast hit a bit of a slump. And in April Shoham and Michel got married, I switched web hosts and Jon Hicks released some new designs that rocked my world. What will the future hold? Well, I will be on the job market soon (knock on wood) so there might be a story or two gestating there. I’ve also got a couple of film and TV-related posts in the works that I plan to finish up and roll out the door in the next week or so, and the new Placebo is just so fantastic that its story must be told.

Anyway, enough rambling. I hope you’ve enjoyed the first six months. Thanks for reading.

Update, May 9, 2006: Example of the effect of changing something by observing it? (well, blogging about it, at least): since I wrote this post 8 days ago DR has moved from the 18th page to the 9th (or 10th depending on Google’s mood at the time)—fickle Google. (Not that I’m ungrateful or anything.)

Update, July 7, 2009: the blog portion of the site used to be called “Dead Reckoning” but is now “Zero to One-Eighty.”