The end result is a ton of functionality that wasn’t in the old blog, a lot of stuff that I’ll no doubt get tired of sooner or later and no longer update when the mood strikes me. The About page, for instance, was thrown together with a minimum amount of thought or effort put into it — and it shows.

But there are other fun things that I probably will use, like the Asides mini-blog to the right, in the second column. It’s now full of one-off comments to myself about the general nature of the Life and Times rebuild, but I imagine someday it will be where I make one-off comments about my day, or about Hillary Clinton’s hair, or about some other thing that isn’t worthy of its own 1200-word main page entry.

I added a feed to my Flickr photostream, which has rarely been updated lately, but for which I have big plans now that it’s on my blog’s front page. (The veracity of this statement is in question, for sure.) And last but not least, down the bottom of that third column I’ve got an RSS feed for my tumblr mini-blog — where I showcase all the LOL-worthy pictures and videos I stumble across.

So there you have it. Lots of fun stuff for me to continue playing around with and maybe it’ll keep me interested for longer than it otherwise would have.

The reasons that prompted the last shut-down were myriad and varied, and were led in part by a dissatisfaction with what was here, a general distaste for personal writing, and a disinterest in maintaining a site like this when I had so much self-maintenance to go through.

The real catalyst, tho, was a continuous and near-daily barrage of hits I received from what appeared to be the corporate headquarters of a company I covered as part of my job. To be fair, the company in question is in the business of accelerating the delivery of Web-based content¹, and the hits were frequently to pages that were old and in many cases random, all of which leads me to believe that it wasn’t really a person on the other side of those hits, but a bot.

However, me being the incredibly neurotic and paranoid fool I am, rather than continue to update the site with increasingly personal tales of various girlfriends and occasional trysts — not to mention the occasionally embarrassing revelations about my family, upbringing, and subsequent emotional failings — I figured enough was enough. Bot or no², it was time to pack up the blog, at least for a time.

The better question is not why I shuttered the blog to begin with, but why I choose to resurrect it.³ The truth is that not much has changed since last I wrote. I’m still working in the same job, living in the same place, and dating around like no one’s business. I still don’t really have the time to pursue any kind of personal writing, and my inclination to do so on a consistent basis remains to be seen. To top it all off, I don’t really have that much new to say.

If anything, I think it comes down to the fact that I missed blogging, missed the cathartic nature of it. To be honest, Life and Times was never about letting others know what I was up to as much as it was about re-examining the things that were happening in my life. And without that presence in my life, I was a little bored. And lonely. And lost.

So I’m gonna try this whole blogging thing all over again, and see if maybe I can’t sustain it a little longer than the last three or four times I did this. Wish me luck. (more…)