Why not start this blog at the beginning of January, as a New Year Resolution?

In 45 years I think it is safe to say that I have failed to keep rather more New Year resolutions than I have kept. It’s not a 100% failure rate, but it’s enough to draw a lesson from: namely that my mind just doesn’t work that way. Drawing a line and saying “henceforth I will do x, y or z” is just setting myself up to fail my own expectations. Which isn’t a good thing.
Far better to establish a goal and resolve to work towards it. To evolve my life in the desired direction rather than making overly-ambitious resolutions of the ‘this starts now’ sort. I must also realise that my health makes some things harder than they would be otherwise - I need to continue to make emotional and intellectual allowances for the difficulties my body and mind encounter in life. For instance, it’s no good saying “I will go for a walk every day” - because the law of averages suggests that I will fail that one within the week, simply because it’s not something I’m physically capable of some days, while other days it is mentally challenging. The later is something I am working on, the former just has to be accepted as things stand, with the hope that things may improve, or at the very least, not get worse :-)

Definition
A 'blog' (a truncation of the expression web log) is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries ('posts') typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first).

History
I first kept a blog in 2004 using MSN Spaces, which later morphed into Windows Live Spaces. This featured included a blogging stem, photo gallery, lists, friends, a guestbook, and a social profile. A Spaces page could be personalized with modules which enabled further customization: media playlists, RSS feeds, picture galleries and so forth. It was, in my opinion, by far the most intuitive, easily used and powerful blogging system i've come across - though obviously the world at large did not agree as the whole thing was shut down in 2011.

For about 2 years i kept a regular blog, posting most days about life in general and also using it in conjunction with a course of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and my own attempts to explain and understand my childhood and teenage experiences. i would post music videos, poems i had written, art - and there was a very lively comments section which involved existing friends and also people who stumbled across my blog. Two people of this latter sort spring to mind. One was a charming woman: an American, black, lesbian whose actually identity remained a mystery, but who appeared to be a rather successful author. We shared tips on cooking, and on the (ahem) 'merits' of a certain Spanish tennis player, "my boy Rafa" as she'd often say.The other guy who springs to mind was another writer, a playwright in fact, who lived in Hawaii. He ... er .. < blinks> ...


Entropy
Hmm, i've now gone totally blank on his name or anything. See this is one of the problems - when the old MSN Spaces closed down, the community was destroyed and all that writing was largely lost. Naively i had just assumed that it would continue but then, poof, gone. That has put me off blogging ever since - the feeling that nothing on the net is permanent ... plus the fact that none of the current blogging environments even approach the ease of use of MSN Spaces. This < waves hand at 'Blogger > is all very well but seems to me to be a retrograde step. One can do a hell of a lot, but it's much less point and click. Maybe simply using it over time will help with that: i really hope so.

Initial organising

Organising a blog to write and as a basis for reading other blogs.