First Post and Why I Have Never Seriously Blogged Before

I’m constantly writing little notes on my iPhone that relate to things I’ve been thinking about. They’re usually not ever really fully formed thoughts or anything that would make sense to anyone else reading them without the context of the schema in my head, but they are some sort of structured thought nonetheless.

But I’ve never really blogged before. There’s a few reasons for this:

I don’t like the idea of everyone knowing what I’m thinking all the time.
It takes so much effort to actually elaborate on all these thoughts and communicate them clearly.
It also takes time just to maintain a blog and regularly update. Sort of like having some sort of pet.

But recently I’ve been reading through a copy of The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz that a friend gave me which, if you don’t know, basically contains a bunch of stuff that Aaron Swartz wrote in his short time here on Earth. Most of the content is Swartz’s blog posts, some of it is transcripts from videos of him speaking, essays he wrote for books, etc. And reading through it has inspired me to take this up since the content which Swartz writes about is similar to what I’d write about in a blog. He also has a very similar writing style to me. All of this combined makes me think “oh, I can probably do this too” especially since the idea of having my own little sort of “island” (website) on the Internet has always appealed to me ever since I was a little kid.

I have tried my hand at blogging before. At first it was on my first site that I made when I was in fourth grade called tomo285.com (it’s a dead link, I let the service expire a long time ago. Named after my AIM screen name). I would mainly talk about Nintendo news as well as write these biographies of characters from The Legend of Zelda series. I eventually lost interest in this but I was pretty consistent about it and was getting a few hundred unique page views per month.

The second time I did some blogging was back before Shaken Earth was the name of my company and was instead just my online handle and the name of a blog I made in sixth grade. I had nearly no posts on it but it was mainly just updates on this program I was writing as I had taught myself Java called Phrasebot.

I think what was really inhibiting me previously from blogging was my feeling that each post had to be super well done and not just what was on my mind and ideas I had thinking about. I felt that each post had to be super complete. This makes sense given that I was recently diagnosed with OCD. And I’ve sort of been coming to realize not even just recently but over the last year or two that that’s not even a very great way to live.

But I also want to have a place on the web to spill my ideas and thoughts onto in long form in an environment that I effectively have full jurisdiction over.

So welcome to my blog. I’ll think of a name as I continue adding posts, but for now it’s unnamed.