It feels a little clichéd to be starting a new project on the first of January, but alas, that’s what I’m doing. For a while now I’ve wanted a “personal” blog outlet, and thus, that’s what this is. Hello, welcome!
I’ve toyed with the idea of making this a “project 365” style endeavour, where I’d be obliged to write once a day, every day, but when I’ve seen other people attempt such projects they’ve nearly always burnt out after two, three or four months. I’ll admit, it’s unlikely I’d manage a whole year, so I’ve taken the valiant decision not to even attempt it.
I should note at this point that last year I was involved in an incredibly ambitious write-every-day project, Project Starborne (archived here). In this — along with six other friends — we attempted to write a group story, where we all had an allocated day and on that day whoever’s turn it was would add a minimum of 200 words to the fictitious adventure.
The Priest composed himself and returned to the congregation. “At this difficult time we must remember the wise words of Cedar Browne, the late 16th-Century Writer of Sayings: ’If Steve leads you down into the crypt today, he’ll probably leave the light on so that you can find your way out again.’ Let us pray that Steve remembers to leave the light on and that the bulb hasn’t gone.”
–An extract from Project Starborne
Sadly, the story very quickly became the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever written, ever, and my entry on the 14th May 2012 was the last one. It wasn’t a bad attempt, though; we wrote over 57,000 words between us, which is no small feat. It was just slightly unfortunate that we all slightly lost interest and the plot fell apart.
This year, then, I’ve learned my lesson and I’ve set myself the slightly more modest goal of a minimum of one post a week here, which — at least for now — seems perfectly achievable.
I’m not going to restrict myself to any particular niche nor will I be particularly be doing anything to promote the blog; I’d like this to be an exercise in quality writing rather than an exercise in search engine optimisation. It’s inevitable that some posts are going to be short, but I’d like to think I’d be able to keep most of the content at a decent length.
To quickly touch on the design, sevenironcows is running a simple, one-column responsive child theme to 2012 which I’ve got plans to release as a free download shortly, likely on another new blog project I’m currently prepping for release. I recorded a screencast a couple of days ago detailing how I made the theme responsive (and just how easy that is), which I’ll be posting on WPShout shortly. Sharing, of course, is caring 🙂
The only question I’ve got left to answer is “why ‘sevenironcows’?” The answer is I’m not entirely sure. I believe it came from when I signed up for a Runescape account many, many years ago and it showed up as one of the suggested usernames. I went with it and it’s stuck, so there you go.
That’s it, then. First post on a new blog! Here’s to 2013! I’ll see you next week 🙂
