In my last post, I mentioned my friend Michal’s [new blog][1], where he writes:
> I think a blog needs a strong **focus**. It’s hard to build an audience when one minute you’re writing about your pet iguana, and the next minute you’re writing about your favorite programming language. For example, my personal blog is **all over the map**. As a result, **few people read it**.
He goes on to explain that when his work demands a new topic, he’ll start a new blog, rather than create a diluted blog with multiple topics. I can see a problem for people like me, who will now have to keep up with all of his blogs instead of one central location for everything he writes. Sure, I’m not really into __forex trading__, for example, but I learn a little when I read those posts.
On the other hand, where would I go if I needed concise and focused information on forex trading? Well, to one of Michal’s blogs maybe!
In my as-yet-unfinished Rails-based (because every Rails developer needs to scratch that itch) blog/personal publishing platform (__[Clutter][c]__), I’m experimenting with combining those two concepts based on the idea of tagging. To explain, there are three major topics I talk about on a semi-regular basis on _Unquiet_:
* [Rails][2]
* [Buddhism][3]
* and my life!
According to Michal (and to search engine experts and _pro bloggers_), splitting the Rails posts and the Buddhism posts into separate blogs would help build an audience and improve my Google Ads performance. Doing that, however, causes the problem I mentioned yesterday — __identity fragmentation__.
So Clutter approaches things a little differently… items tagged ‘rails’ not only show up on my main blog page, but also on subpages, for example `/clutter/tag/rails`. Wordpress plugins let you do this part already; the cool part is that I’m designing the application so that I could drop in a new theme for that tag only, and so I can point different domain names to any part of the application.
When I replace my current blog engine (WordPress) with Clutter, I’ll be able to have separate blogs with separate themes and separate appearances at rails.unquiet.net, buddhism.unquiet.net (or even anunquietbuddhist.net), mimicking the flexibility and focus of separate blogs while making it easier for me to have a centralised blog (blog.unquiet.net) where _everything_ goes.
That’s how I feel organizing my incoming and outgoing information works best: _one input, many views; one output, many expressions_.
[c]: http://blog.unquiet.net/tag/clutter/page/2/
[1]: http://cashflowblogging.com/2006/02/the-blog-work-cycle
[2]: http://blog.unquiet.net/tag/rails
[3]: http://blog.unquiet.net/tag/buddhism
One Comment
I went back and forth on this exact issue, which is one reason it took me so long to start doing the multiple blog things - I’ve been kicking the idea around for ages. The plan is to have a single site that aggregates all the blogs (except possibly the cornerhost status blog) over at tangentcloud.com, and then have a little banner at the top that says “part of the tangentcloud network” and maybe a random link to another blog. I just haven’t gotten that far yet.
I also keep all the blogs in one database, and my tool supports tagging, but hadn’t thought about separating the feeds that way. I was going to combine all the little ones by using planet.
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