… busy. Aside from work stuff, there have been reasons for me to leave the house almost every day this week. Last night was the most unusual one — a party for people who worked on a textbook. I proofread, and so I got invited along. Food, and drink, and some good conversation. I met a (lit?) professor at Hong Ik who is into SF. And one of the editors of the book I proofread remarked on my place of birth, Malawi.
How did she know? She’d come and read this page. This surprised me, and I am taking it as an alarm call. For a long time, I’ve been thinking about this website as something that dangerously skirts the line between a professional presence online and a “personal blog.” I post about my writing, I post about work, I post rants about being nearly-attacked at subway stations — it’s been a kind of kitchen-sink blog.
I think it’s time for that to change. I ordered some cute business cards and I would like to be able to hand them out. To do that, I think I need to have this page be the sort of thing I’d be comfortable having just about anyone visit — my students, my co-workers, my friends, people I don’t know.
So it seems to me, this site needs to be changed somewhat. I don’t know exactly how, nor do I know exactly when this will happen, but I suspect it’s going to be in late February, since I am leaving for Laos (and then Thailand) in a few short days.
So anyway, if you end up looking at the RSS feed sometime, and finding an announcement that the blog feed has changed, that’s why. I’ll probably continue to use this site to organize my posts, and may even simply partition the “bloggy” stuff with a slightly different template just to suggest the difference in content and its gravity. Or I might leave all the “bloggy” stuff off here, inaccessible, and start using the crosspost feed on Livejournal as the main “blog.” I don’t know yet, but I am thinking about it.
And now, off for a course-planning meeting, to be followed by beer and discussion. Must go. NOW.
Why dilute the brand by moving to livejournal? If you are worried about your professional image, move all the teaching posts (not that I think the posts are unprofessional but you never know what people might think) over to the livejournal url?
If we put it in terms of branding — though that reminds me of this disturbing/amusing story — I think it’s more about diversifying the brand, and making sure the right target audiences get the right content, or, rather, that certain potential audiences don’t get content not intended for them.
(As in, I tend to think my writing about Korea isn’t really so radical, but people are starting to be more aware of the fact you can just google people, and given the overall defensiveness of their own nation that is so common here, I tend to think that even my more reasonable rants may cause problems for me at some point.)
I’m also considering some combination of scrupulous Friends-only crossposts, along with two RSS feeds (one for subscribers, and one for non-subscribers), with “Private” posts available to subscribers. As well, I’m thinking of color-coding different pages on this site — various shades of dark brown, greys, and black for various different texts. Wherein the “main blog” (which would have to be clicked through to) is white text on black background, thus suggesting for that content a somewhat different status. This may or may not make a difference, but it seems like another way to differentiate the “informal” blog content from the rest. (As would an added front page containing “news” type items, and which most casual users would possible take for the main page.)
But it’s a big redesign job, so I think it’s going to take some time. We’ll see what I decide in mid-February.