Photo by Taro Yamamoto.
Hey, welcome to my blog!
You may be asking, “New blog? What the hell have you been doing for the last eight years?”
Let me explain. (This is very inside-Grist-baseball, so if you don’t care about that stuff, read my scintillating recent post on EPA’s new carbon rule.)
Way back in … what was it? … 2004 or so, I started Grist’s first blog, which was called Gristmill. (Ah, the old days.) Back then it was super-bloggy. I posted three, four, five times a day, short posts, linking to this, making off-hand comments about that, snarking, the usual blog stuff.
When we redesigned the site several years ago, Gristmill was basically shut down and the distinction between what was “on the blog” and what was “on the site” disappeared. We decided readers didn’t care about that distinction. It was all just on the site.
One consequence of this shift was that the home page became the main, not to say only, route into the site for most people. If you didn’t put your piece on the home page, nobody would see it. And so it came to be that pretty much everything I published ended up on the home page.
But there were (and are) limited slots on the home page. If I published three or four posts a day like in the old days, I’d end up dominating the home page, pushing other stuff off, which is not optimal.
So, partly as a consequence, I started publishing longer, more crafted, more researched posts — essays, I guess you’d call them — at the rate of one a day or so. Other factors fueled this shift too. Part of it was a desire to dig deeper into certain subjects. Part of it was Twitter, which serves as a repository for all the little bits and pieces I used to put on the blog.
Anyway, for all these reasons, I’ve been publishing longer posts, less frequently — very un-bloggish.
Lately, though, I’ve been hankering to get back in the old bloggy spirit. So we’ve created a blog for me, which looks like a blog and behaves like a blog. It has its own RSS feed. I will be posting on it relatively frequently, and not everything that appears here will appear on the home page.
So, bookmark it! Subscribe. We’re going to party like it’s 2004.
