On the first day of this year, I made a resolution to build up this blog by making one post every day.
I had a 100-day post, and had planned for a six-month retrospective, but it got lost. So here's the status, 300 days in.
And what have I learned?
It would be difficult to do this without the daily plan, because sometimes that's the only reason to find something relevant to the blog's goals. It always starts with a blank page, and I expect that if I missed one day, I'd soon miss two, then three...
Having a daily deadline is a great way to ensure that something is going in. You learn how much you like writing on a daily basis. Decisions have to be made about what is good enough, and when to let it go. It can be easy to let mistakes slide, to give up that last re-read since it must already be correct. That also makes it easier to see why newspapers need editors - if you are writing without any backup, it's too easy to let mistakes slide.
It takes some time to do this daily. It's a good day when it only takes a couple of hours to identify, compose, link, and post an entry here. Some days have been longer, some posts (like this one, even) take a few days to set up. Which is isn't exactly a problem, but isn't sustainable long-term unless it starts paying, one way or another.
Looking at what other sites do (history focused or not), there's usually a trade off between depth of reporting and frequency. There are click bait sites which figure out groups of related pages ("Ten facts you didn't know about Pulp Fiction" - I did, they were mostly on IMDB), which might not work with "How to tell 16th Century Popes apart." Epictimes has many updates each day, posting links of interest with short, twitter friendly descriptions. History Unfolding promises only a post a week but the one post is extensive, well thought out and ready for publication. (Blog author David Kaiser has recently started writing for Time.com.) Nuclear Secrecy posts irregularly but with well written and impressively researched pieces.
This blog will need to go in one of those directions, soon. A daily post for the sake of posting is good to encourage forward movement but can be bad for quality. The original idea was to point out items indicating the crisis and those don't happen every day. They do require some explanation, and not every tragic incident marks the Crisis. There is still some need to go over the specifics of how Strauss and Howe works. It will all have to come together.
Finally, some interesting historical realizations that I've had over these last 200 days:
- The time between Trinity and the end of World War II was amazingly short,
- The original Annie cartoonist was not a fan of FDR (even though the musical producers clearly were.)
- England's late start in New World colonization probably was related to being a minor enough power that it couldn't reasonably protect folks that far away. (Although England's domestic situation surely had an impact as well).
- Television shows also seem to be doing different Crisis possibilities.
- The Roman Empire was once divided into three parts.
- And of course, today is the 50th anniversary of Reagan's A Time for Choosing speech, an important milestone in his career and American conservatism. In case you missed that earlier.
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